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DELEUZE 

GUATTARI

 

 

a thousand plateaus

 

c a p i t a l i s m   and  s c h i z o p h r e n i a

 

t r a n s l a t i o n  and 

f o r e w o r d   by

 

b r i a n     m a s s u m i

 

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A Thousand Plateaus

 

 

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A THOUSAND 

PLATEAUS

 

Capitalism and 

Schizophrenia

 

Gilles Deleuze Felix 

Guattari

 

Translation and Foreword by Brian Massumi

 

University of Minnesota Press

 

Minneapolis

 

London

 

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The University of Minnesota Press gratefully 
acknowledges translation assistance provided for this 
book by the French Ministry of Culture and by the 
National Endowment for the Humanities, an 
independent federal agency.

 

Copyright © 1987 by the University of Minnesota Press All rights 
reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a 
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, 
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, 
without the prior written permission of the publisher.

 

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

 

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

 

http://www.upress.umn.edu

 

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

 

Eleventh printing 2005

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Deleuze, Gilles.

 

[Mille plateaux. English]

 

A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia/Gilles 

Deleuze, Felix Guattari; translation and foreword by Brian 
Massumi. p. cm.

 

Translation of: Mille plateaux, v. 2 of Capitalisme et 

schizophrenic.

 

A companion volume to Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and

 

schizophrenia.

 

Bibliography: p.

 

Includes index.

 

ISBN 0-8166-1401-6

 

ISBN 0-8166-1402-4 (pbk.)

 

1. Philosophy.      I. Guattari, Felix.      II. Title 

B77.D413    1987 
194-dcl9 

87-18623

 

Originally published as Mille Plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et 
Schizophrenic 
© 1980 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris.

 

Photo of Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor, 
reproduced by permission of G. Ricordi, Milan, copyright © 1970 
by G. Ricordi E.C. SPA; photo of Fernand Leger, Men in the 
Cities, 
1919, copyright © 1987 by ARS, N.Y./SPADEM; photo of 
Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922, reproduced by permission of 
The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., copyright © 1987 by 
Cosmopress, Geneva.

 

The University of Minnesota 
is an equal-opportunity 
educator and employer.

 

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Contents

 

Translator's Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy Brian Massumi 

ix

 

Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments 

xvi

 

Author's Note 

xx

 

1.  Introduction: Rhizome

 
3 Root, radicle, and rhizome—Issues concerning books—The One 
and the Multiple—Tree and rhizome—The geographical directions, 
Orient, Occident, America—The misdeeds of the tree—What is a 
plateau? 

2.  1914: One or Several Wolves? 

26 

Neurosis and psychosis—For a theory of multiplicities—Packs—The 

unconscious and the molecular 

3.  10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think 

It Is?) 

39

 

Strata—Double articulation (segmentarity)—What constitutes the 

unity of a stratum—Milieus—The diversity within a stratum: forms 

and substances, epistrata and parastrata—Content and expression— 

The diversity among strata—The molar and the molecular—Abstract 

machine and assemblage: their comparative states—Metastrata

 

4.  November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics 

75 

The order-word—Indirect discourse—Order-words, acts, and incor-

 

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vi □ CONTENTS

 

poreal transformations—Dates—Content and expression, and their 

respective variables—The aspects of the assemblage—Constants, var-

iables, and continuous variation—Music—Style—Major and minor 

—Becoming—Death and escape, figure and metamorphosis

 

5.  587 B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs 

111 

The signifying despotic regime—The passional subjective regime— 

The two kinds of delusion and the problem of psychiatry—The 

ancient history of the Jewish people—The line of flight and the 

prophet—The face, turning away, and betrayal—The Book—The sys-

tem of subjectivity: consciousness and passion, Doubles—Domestic 

squabble and office squabble—Redundancy—The figures of 

deter-ritorialization—Abstract machine and diagram—The 

generative, the transformational, the diagrammatic, and the machinic 

6.  November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without 

Organs? 

149 

The body without organs, waves and intensities—The egg— 

Masochism, courtly love, and the Tao—The strata and the plane of 

consistency—Antonin Artaud—The art of caution—The three-body 

problem—Desire, plane, selection, and composition 

7.  Year Zero: Faciality 

167 

White wall, black hole—The abstract machine of faciality—Body, 

head, and face—Face and landscape—The courtly novel—Theorems 

of deterritorialization—The face and Christ—The two figures of the 

face: frontal view and profile, the turning away—Dismantling the face 

8.  1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?" 

192 

The novella and the tale: the secret—The three lines—Break, crack, 

and rupture—The couple, the double, and the clandestine 

9.  1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity 

208 

Segmentarity, primitive and civilized—The molar and the molec-

ular—Fascism and totalitarianism—The segmented line and the 

quantum flow—Gabriel Tarde—Masses and classes—The abstract 

machine: mutation and overcoding—What is a power center?—The 

three lines and the dangers of each—Fear, clarity, power, and death 

10. 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming- 

Imperceptible . .. 

232 

Becoming—Three aspects of sorcery: multiplicity; the Anomalous, or 

the Outsider; transformations—Individuation and Haecceity: five 

o'clock in the evening—Longitude, latitude, and the plane of 

consistency—The two planes, or the two conceptions of the plane—

 

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CONTENTS □ vii

 

Becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-animal, 
becoming-molecular: zones of proximity—Becoming 
imperceptible—The secret—Majority, minority, minoritarian—The 
minoritarian character and dissymmetry of becoming: double 
becoming—Point and line, memory and becoming—Becoming and 
block—The opposition between punctual systems and multilinear 
systems—Music, painting, and becomings—The refrain—Theorems 
of deterritorialization continued—Becoming versus imitation

 

11.  1837: Of the Refrain 

310 

In the dark, at home, toward the world—Milieus and rhythm—The 
placard and the territory—Expression as style: rhythmic faces, 
melodic landscapes—Bird song—Territoriality, assemblages, and 
interassemblages—The territory and the earth, the Natal—The prob-
lem of consistency—Machinic assemblage and abstract machine— 
Classicism and milieus—Romanticism, the territory, the earth, and 
the people—Modern art and the cosmos—Form and substance, forces 
and material—Music and refrains; the great and the small refrain 

12.  1227: Treatise on Nomadology:—The War Machine 

351 

The two poles of the State—The irreducibility and exteriority of the 
war machine—The man of war—Minor and major: the minor 
sciences—The body and esprit de corps—Thought, the State, and 
nomadology—First aspect: the war machine and nomad space— 
Second aspect: the war machine and the composition of people, the 
nomad number—Third aspect: the war machine and nomad affects 
—Free action and work—The nature of assemblages: tools and signs, 
arms and jewelry—Metallurgy, itinerancy, and nomadism—The 
machinic phylum and technological lineages—Smooth space, stri-
ated space, holey space—The war machine and war: the complexities 
of the relation 

13.  7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture 

424 

The paleolithic State—Primitive groups, towns, States, and world-
wide organizations—Anticipate, ward off—The meaning of the word 
"last" (marginalism)—Exchange and stock—Capture: landownership 
(rent), fiscal organization (taxation), public works (profit)—The prob-
lem of violence—The forms of the State and the three ages of Law— 
Capitalism and the State—Subjection and enslavement—Issues in 
axiomatics 

14.  1440: The Smooth and the Striated 

474 

The technological model (textile)—The musical model—The mari- 

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viii □ CONTENTS

 

time model—The mathematical model (multiplicities)—The physi-

cal model—The aesthetic model (nomad art)

 

15. Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines 

501

 

Notes 

517

 

Bibliography (compiled by Brian Massumi) 

579

 

Index 

587

 

List of Illustrations 

611

 

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Translator's Foreword: 

Pleasures of Philosophy

 

Brian Massumi

 

This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy sub-
sets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to 
approach it. What do you do with a book that dedicates an entire chapter to 
music and animal behavior—and then claims that it isn't a chapter? That 
presents itself as a network of "plateaus" that are precisely dated, but can 
be read in any order? That deploys a complex technical vocabulary drawn 
from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the 
humanities, but whose authors recommend that you read it as you would 
listen to a record?

1

 

"Philosophy, nothing but philosophy."

2

 Of a bastard line.

 

The annals of official philosophy are populated by "bureaucrats of pure 

reason" who speak in "the shadow of the despot" and are in historical com-
plicity with the State.

3

 They invent "a properly spiritual... absolute State that 

... effectively functions in the mind." Theirs is the discourse of sovereign 
judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by "good" sense, of rocklike iden-
tity, "universal" truth, and (white male) justice. "Thus the exercise of their 
thought is in conformity with the aims of the real State, with the dominant sig-
nifications, and with the requirements of the established order."

4

 

Gilles Deleuze was schooled in that philosophy. The titles of his earliest

 

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x

  □ TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

 

books read like a Who's Who of philosophical giants. "What got me by dur-

ing that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of 

ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. 

I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child 

that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous."

5

 Hegel is 

absent, being too despicable to merit even a mutant offspring.

6

 To Kant he 

dedicated an affectionate study of "an enemy." Yet much of positive value 

came of Deleuze's flirtation with the greats. He discovered an orphan line of 

thinkers who were tied by no direct descendance but were united in their 

opposition to the State philosophy that would nevertheless accord them 

minor positions in its canon. Between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, 

Nietzsche, and Bergson there exists a "secret link constituted by the critique 

of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of 

forces and relations, the denunciation of power."

7

 Deleuze's first major 

statements written in his own voice, Difference et repetition (1968) and 
Logique du sens (1969), cross-fertilized that line of "nomad" thought with 

contemporary theory. The ferment of the student-worker revolt of May 1968 

and the reassessment it prompted of the role of the intellectual in society

8

 led 

him to disclaim the "ponderous academic apparatus"

9

 still in evidence in 

those works. However, many elements of the "philosophy of difference" they 

elaborated were transfused into a continuing collaboration, of which 
Thousand Plateaus 
is the most recent product.

 

Felix Guattari is a practicing psychoanalyst and lifelong political activ-

ist. He has worked since the mid-1950s at La Borde, an experimental psy-

chiatric clinic founded by Lacanian analyst Jean Oury. Guattari himself 

was among Lacan's earliest trainees, and although he never severed his ties 

with Lacan's Freudian School the group therapy practiced at La Borde 

took him in a very different direction. The aim at La Borde was to abolish 

the hierarchy between doctor and patient in favor of an interactive group 

dynamic that would bring the experiences of both to full expression in such 

a way as to produce a collective critique of the power relations in society as 

a whole. "The central perspective is... to promote human relations that do 

not automatically fall into roles or stereotypes but open onto fundamental 

relations of a metaphysical kind that bring out the most radical and basic 

alienations of madness or neurosis"

10

 and channel them into revolutionary 

practice. Guattari collaborated beginning in 1960 on group projects dedi-

cated to developing this radical "institutional psychotherapy,"

11

 and later 

entered an uneasy alliance with the international antipsychiatry move-

ment spearheaded by R.D. Laing in England and Franco Basaglia in Italy.

12 

As Lacanian schools of psychoanalysis gained ground against psychiatry, 

the contractual Oedipal relationship between the analyst and the transfer-

ence-bound analysand became as much of a target for Guattari as the legal

 

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T

RANSLATOR'S FOREWORD D xi

 

bondage of the institutionalized patient in the conventional State hospital. 

He came to occupy the same position in relation to psychoanalysis as he 

had all along in relation to the parties of the left: an ultra-opposition within 

the opposition. His antihierarchical leanings made him a precursor to the 

events of May 1968 and an early partisan of the social movements that 

grew from them, including feminism and the gay rights movement.

l}

 

Anti-Oedipus  (1972),

u

 his first book with Deleuze, gave philosophical 

weight to his convictions and created one of the intellectual sensations of 

postwar France with its spirited polemics against State-happy or pro-party 

versions of Marxism and school-building strains of psychoanalysis, 

which separately and in various combinations represented the dominant 

intellectual currents of the time (in spite of the fundamentally anarchist 

nature of the spontaneous popular uprisings that had shaken the world in 

1968). "The most tangible result of Anti-Oedipus was that it short-circuited 

the connection between psychoanalysis and the far left parties," in which 

he and Deleuze saw the potential for a powerful new bureaucracy of 

analytic reason.

15

 

For many French intellectuals, the hyperactivism of post-May gave way 

to a mid-seventies slump, then a return to religion (Tel Quel) or political 

conservatism (the Nouveaux Philosophes) in a foreshadowing of the 

Reagan eighties. Deleuze and Guattari never recanted. Nor did they sim-

ply revive the polemics. A Thousand Plateaus (1980), written over a 

seven-year period, was billed as a sequel to Anti-Oedipus and shares its 

subtitle,  Capitalism and Schizophrenia. But it constitutes a very different 

project. It is less a critique than a positive exercise in the affirmative 

"nomad" thought called for in Anti-Oedipus.

 

"State philosophy" is another word for the representational thinking 

that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered 

an at least momentary setback during the last quarter century at the hands 

of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and poststructuralist theory gener-

ally. As described by Deleuze,

16

 it reposes on a double identity: of the thinking 

subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own 

presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subject, its concepts, 

and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a 

shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Rep-

resentational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspon-

dence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of 

judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms 

is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought 

its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are 

limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties 

possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and

 

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xii □ TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

 

hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a 

term's self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or 

gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = noty. Iden-

tity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for 

order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally 

been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the 

State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth cen-

tury with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become 

the model for higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. 

The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by 

Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the "spiritual and moral training of the 

nation," to be achieved by "deriving everything from an original principle" 

(truth), by "relating everything to an ideal" (justice), and by "unifying this 

principle and this ideal in a single Idea" (the State). The end product would 

be "a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society"

17

—each mind an 

analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the 

State. Prussian mind-meld.

18

 More insidious than the well-known practi-

cal cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning mili-

tary funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the 

form of representational thinking itself, that "properly spiritual absolute 

State" endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social 

fabric. Deconstruction-influenced feminists such as Helene Cixous and 

Luce Irigaray have attacked it under the name "phallogocentrism" (what 

the most privileged model of rocklike identity is goes without saying). In 

the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe it 

as the "arborescent model" of thought (the proudly erect tree under whose 

spreading boughs latter-day Platos conduct their class).

 

"Nomad thought" does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered 

interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose 

on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division 

between the three domains of representation, subject, concept, and being; 

it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds. 

The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislat-

ing subject, but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which 

their subject, to the extent that they can be said to have one, is only secon-

dary. They do not reflect upon the world but are immersed in a changing 

state of things. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of 

reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the 

brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain 

encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a 

juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The 

edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations

 

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TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD □ xiii

 

encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. "What interests us are the 

circumstances."

19

 Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of 

circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application 

of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. 

The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act. Nomad 

thought replaces the closed equation of representation, x = x = noty (I = I 

= not you) with an open equation: ... + y + z + a + ...(...+ arm + brick + 

window + ...). Rather than analyzing the world into discrete components, 

reducing their manyness to the One of identity, and ordering them by rank, 

it sums up a set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthe-

sizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hin-

dering their potential for future rearranging (to the contrary). The modus 

operandi of nomad thought is affirmation, even when its apparent object is 

negative. Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from outside 

to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls.

 

The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. 

Air against earth. State space is "striated," or gridded. Movement in it is 

confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of 

that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad 

space is "smooth," or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move 

to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an 

open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself 

in a closed space (hold the fort).

 

A Thousand Plateaus is an effort to construct a smooth space of 

thought. It is not the first such attempt. Like State philosophy, nomad 

thought goes by many names. Spinoza called it "ethics." Nietzsche called 

it the "gay science." Artaud called it "crowned anarchy." To Maurice 

Blanchot, it is the "space of literature." To Foucault, "outside thought."

20 

In this book, Deleuze and Guattari employ the terms "pragmatics" and 

"schizoanalysis," and in the introduction describe a rhizome network 

strangling the roots of the infamous tree. One of the points of the book is 

that nomad thought is not confined to philosophy. Or that the kind of phi-

losophy it is comes in many forms. Filmmakers and painters are philo-

sophical thinkers to the extent that they explore the potentials of their 

respective mediums and break away from the beaten paths.

21

 On a strictly 

formal level, it is mathematics and music that create the smoothest of the 

smooth spaces.

22

 In fact, Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more 

inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form 

of philosophy.

 

Which returns to our opening question. How should A Thousand Pla-

teaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you 

cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you

 

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x

iv D TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

 

have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They 

follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go 

about your daily business.

 

A Thousand Plateaus is conceived as an open system.

23

 It does not pre-

tend to have the final word. The authors' hope, however, is that elements of 

it will stay with a certain number of its readers and will weave into the mel-

ody of their everyday lives.

 

Each "plateau" is an orchestration of crashing bricks extracted from a 

variety of disciplinary edifices. They carry traces of their former emplace-

ment, which give them a spin defining the arc of their vector. The vectors 

are meant to converge at a volatile juncture, but one that is sustained, as an 

open equilibrium of moving parts each with its own trajectory. The word 

"plateau" comes from an essay by Gregory Bateson on Balinese culture, in 

which he found a libidinal economy quite different from the West's orgas-

mic orientation.

24

 In Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when cir-

cumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not 

automatically dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sus-

tained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can 

be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive 

states between which any number of connecting routes could exist. Each 

section of A Thousand Plateaus tries to combine conceptual bricks in such 

a way as to construct this kind of intensive state in thought. The way the 

combination is made is an example of what Deleuze and Guattari call 

consistency—not in the sense of a homogeneity, but as a holding together 

of disparate elements (also known as a "style").

25

 A style in this sense, as a 

dynamic holding together or mode of composition, is not something lim-

ited to writing. Filmmakers, painters, and musicians have their styles, 

mathematicians have theirs, rocks have style, and so do tools, and technol-

ogies, and historical periods, even—especially—punctual events. Each 

section is dated, because each tries to reconstitute a dynamism that has 

existed in other mediums at other times. The date corresponds to the point 

at which that particular dynamism found its purest incarnation in matter, 

the point at which it was freest from interference from other modes and 

rose to its highest degree of intensity. That never lasts more than a flash, 

because the world rarely leaves room for uncommon intensity, being in 

large measure an entropic trashbin of outworn modes that refuse to die. 

Section 12, for example, the "Treatise on Nomadology," is dated 1227 

A

.

D

.

 

because that is when the nomad war machine existed for a moment in its 

pure form on the vacant smooth spaces of the steppes of Inner Asia.

 

The reader is invited to follow each section to the plateau that rises from 

the smooth space of its composition, and to move from one plateau to the 

next at pleasure. But it is just as good to ignore the heights. You can take a

 

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T

RANSLATOR'S FOREWORD □ xv

 

concept that is particularly to your liking and jump with it to its next 

appearance. They tend to cycle back. Some might call that repetitious. 

Deleuze and Guattari call it a refrain.

 

Most of all, the reader is invited to lift a dynamism out of the book 

entirely, and incarnate it in a foreign medium, whether it be painting or 

politics. The authors steal from other disciplines with glee, but they are 

more than happy to return the favor. Deleuze's own image for a concept is 

not a brick, but a "tool box."

26

 He calls his kind of philosophy "pragmatics" 

because its goal is the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system 

of belief or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you 

don't, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand 

envelops an energy of prying.

 

The best way of all to approach the book is to read it as a challenge: to pry 

open the vacant spaces that would enable you to build your life and those of 

the people around you into a plateau of intensity that would leave afterim-

ages of its dynamism that could be reinjected into still other lives, creating 

a fabric of heightened states between which any number, the greatest num-

ber, of connecting routes would exist. Some might call that promiscuous. 

Deleuze and Guattari call it revolution.

 

The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts 

does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possi-

ble to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?

 

The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be "none." If that hap-

pens, it's not your tune. No problem. But you would have been better off 

buying a record.

 

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Notes on the Translation

 

and

 

Acknowledgments

 

AFFECT

/

AFFECTION

.

 

Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment 

in Deleuze and Guattari). L 'affect (Spinoza's affectus) is an ability to affect 
and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage 
from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an 
augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act. L'affection 
(Spinoza's affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between 
the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its 
broadest possible sense to include "mental" or ideal bodies).

 

DRAW

.

 

In A Thousand Plateaus, to draw is an act of creation. What is 

drawn (the Body without Organs, the plane of consistency, a line of flight) 
does not preexist the act of drawing. The French word tracer captures this 
better: It has all the graphic connotations of "to draw" in English, but can 
also mean to blaze a trail or open a road. "To trace" {decalquer), on the 
other hand, is to copy something from a model.

 

FLIGHT

/

ESCAPE

.

 

Both words translate fuite, which has a different range 

of meanings than either of the English terms. Fuite covers not only the act 
of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the 
distance (the vanishing point in a painting is a point de fuite). It has no rela-
tion to flying.

 

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N

OTES ON THE TRANSLATION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS □ xvii

 

MILIEU. In French, milieu  means "surroundings," "medium" (as in 

chemistry), and "middle." In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, 
"milieu" should be read as a technical term combining all three meanings.

 

PLANE

.

 

The word plan designates both a "plane" in the geometrical sense 

and a "plan." The authors use it primarily in the first sense. Where both 
meanings seem to be present (as in discussions of the, plan d'organisatori) 
"plan(e)" has been used in the translation.

 

POWER. Two words for "power" exist in French, puissance and pouvoir. 

In Deleuze and Guattari, they are associated with very different concepts 
(although the terminological distinction is not consistently observed). 
Puissance refers to a range of potential. It has been defined by Deleuze as a 
"capacity for existence," "a capacity to affect or be affected," a capacity to 
multiply connections that may be realized by a given "body" to varying 
degrees in different situations. It may be thought of as a scale of intensity or 
fullness of existence (or a degree on such a scale), analogous to the capacity 
of a number to be raised to a higher "power." It is used in the French trans-
lation of Nietzsche's term "will to power." Like its English counterpart, it 
has an additional mathematical usage, designating the number of elements 
in a finite or infinite set. Here, puissance pertains to the virtual (the plane 
of consistency), pouvoir  to the actual (the plane of organization). The 
authors use pouvoir in a sense very close to Foucault's, as an instituted and 
reproducible relation of force, a selective concretization of potential. Both 
puissance and pouvoir have been translated here as "power," since the dis-
tinction between the concepts is usually clear from the context. The French 
terms have been added in parentheses where confusion might arise, and in 
occasional passages where puissance is rendered as "potential."

 

PROCESS

/

PROCEEDING

.

 

The authors employ two words normally trans-

lated as "process." Processus in their usage is the more general of the two, 
covering both the stratified and destratified dimensions of an occurrence. 
Proces pertains only to the stratification. In standard French, proces also 
means "trial" (as in the title of the Kafka novel). Deleuze and Guattari 
exploit this polysemy as a way of emphasizing the role of organizations of 
social power and regimes of signs in operations constitutive of the subject, 
or proces de subjectivation. Proces is usually (once again, there is slippage in 
their usage) translated as "proceeding," despite the occasional awkward-
ness this produces in English, in an attempt to preserve both associations: a 
process, or way of proceeding, and a legal proceeding, or trial. Processus is 
always "process."

 

SELF. Both Moi and Soi have usually been translated as "Self," with the 

French in brackets. Soi  is the self in its broadest sense, but as a neuter 
third-person pronoun implies an impersonality at the basis of the self. 
Moi is a

 

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x

viii D NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

more restricted concept: the "me" as subject of enunciation for the "I" (je) 

as subject of the statement. It is also the French term for the Freudian ego.

 

SIGNIFIANCE/INTERPRETANCE. I have followed the increasingly com-

mon practice of importing signifiance and interpr'etance into English with-

out modification. In Deleuze and Guattari these terms refer respectively to 

the syntagmatic and paradigmatic processes of language as a "signifying 

regime of signs." They are borrowed from Benveniste ("signifying capac-

ity" and "interpretative capacity" are the English translations used in 

Benveniste's work).

 

STATEMENT

.

 

Enonce  (often "utterance") has been translated here as 

"statement," in keeping with the choice of the English translators of 

Foucault, to whose conception Deleuze and Guattari's is closest. "Enunci-

ation" is used for enonciation.

 

TRAIT. The word trait has a range of meanings not covered by any single 

word in English. Literally, it refers to a graphic drawing, and to the act of 

drawing a line. Abstractly, it is the purely graphic element. Figuratively, it 

is an identifying mark (a feature, or trait in the English sense), or any act 

constituting a mark or sign. In linguistics, "distinctive features" {traits 
distinctifs  
or  traits pertinents) are the elementary units of language that 

combine to form a phoneme. Trait also refers to a projectile, especially an 

arrow, and to the act of throwing a projectile. Here, "trait" has been 

retained in all but narrowly linguistic contexts.

 

GENDER-BIASED 

USAGE 

has been largely eliminated through 

plural-ization or the use of male and female pronouns. However, where 

Deleuze and Guattari seem deliberately to be using "man" to designate a 

socially constructed, patriarchal standard of human behavior applied to 

both men and women, the masculine generic has been retained.

 

* * * 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. I would like to express my gratitude to the 

National Endowment for the Humanities and the French Ministry of Cul-

ture for their generous assistance, without which this translation would not 

have been possible, and to the authors for their patience in answering my 

questions. Winnie Berman, Ken Dean, Nannie Doyle, Shoshana Felman, 

Jim Fleming, Robert Hurley, Fredric Jameson, Sylvere Lotringer, Susan 

McClary, Giorgio Passerone, Paul Patton, Dana Polan, Mary Quaintance, 

Michael Ryan, Lianne Sullivan, Susan Yazijian, and Caveh Zahedi pro-

vided much-appreciated aid and advice. Glenn Hendler likes to see his 

name in print.

 

I consulted the following translations: "Rhizome" (first version), trans. 

Paul Foss and Paul Patton, Ideology and Consciousness, no. 8 (Spring 1981,

 

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NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS □ xix

 

pp. 49-71); "Rhizome" (final version), trans. John Johnston in Deleuze 

and Guattari, On the Line (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983); "One or Sev-

eral Wolves?" (first version), trans. Mark Seem, Semiotext(e), vol. 2, no. 3, 

pp. 137-147 (1977); "How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs" (first 

version, abridged), trans. Suzanne Guerlac, Semiotext(e)  vol. 4, no. 1 

(1981), pp. 265-270.

 

Portions of this translation have appeared previously. "Treatise on 

Nomadology" was published as a separate book entitled Nomad Machine 

(New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). Extracts from "Becoming-Intense ..." 

appeared under the title "Becoming-Woman" in Subjects/Objects, no. 3 

(Spring 1985), pp. 24-32, and from "The Smooth and the Striated" under 

the title "Nomad Art" mArtandText, no. 19(Oct.-Nov. 1985), pp. 16-23.

 

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Authors' Note

 

This book is the companion volume to Anti-Oedipus (paperback ed., Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, 1983). Together they make up Capitalism and 
Schizophrenia.

 

It is composed not of chapters but of "plateaus." We will try to explain 

why later on (and also why the texts are dated). To a certain extent, these 

plateaus may be read independently of one another, except the conclusion, 

which should be read at the end.

 

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A Thousand Plateaus

 

 

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SYLVANO BUSSOTI

 

The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, 
there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that 
came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have 
assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our 
own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecog-
nizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us 
act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say 
the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To 
reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no 
longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. 
Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.

 

A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed 

matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a 
subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their 
relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological move-
ments. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or 
segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of 
deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on

 

3

 

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4

  D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on 

the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable 

speeds, constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, 

and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don't know yet 

what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has 

been elevated to the status of a substantive. One side of a machinic assem-

blage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signi-

fying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side 

facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organ-

ism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, 

and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a 

name as the trace of an intensity. What is the body without organs of a 

book? There are several, depending on the nature of the lines considered, 

their particular grade or density, and the possibility of their converging on 

a "plane of consistency" assuring their selection. Here, as elsewhere, the 

units of measure are what is essential: quantify writing. There is no differ-

ence between what a book talks about and how it is made. Therefore a book 

also has no object. As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection 

with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We 

will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look 

for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in con-

nection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in 

which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and 

with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists 

only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little 

machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a 

war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.—and an abstract 
machine 
that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting 

literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other 

machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in 

order to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordi-

nary bureaucratic machine . . . (What if one became animal or plant 
through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first 

through the voice that one becomes animal?) Literature is an assemblage. 

It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been. 

All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata and segmentarities, lines 

of flight and intensities, machinic assemblages and their various types, 

bodies without organs and their construction and selection, the plane of 

consistency, and in each case the units of measure. Stratometers, 
deleometers, BwO units of density, BwO units of convergence: 
Not only do 

these constitute a quantification of writing, but they define writing as 

always the measure of something else. Writing has nothing to do with

 

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I

NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 5

 

signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to 

come.

 

A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the image of the 

world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as 

noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book). 

The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific 

to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. The law of the 

book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two. How could the law 

of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides over the very division 

between world and book, nature and art? One becomes two: whenever we 

encounter this formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in 

the most "dialectical" way possible, what we have before us is the most clas-

sical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature 

doesn't work that way: in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, 

lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous 

one. Thought lags behind nature. Even the book as a natural reality is a tap-

root, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as a spiri-

tual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the 

One that becomes two, then of the two that become four. . . Binary logic is 

the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a discipline as "advanced" as lin-

guistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains 

wedded to classical reflection (for example, Chomsky and his grammatical 

trees, which begin at a point S and proceed by dichotomy). This is as much 

as to say that this system of thought has never reached an understanding of 

multiplicity: in order to arrive at two following a spiritual method it must 

assume a strong principal unity. On the side of the object, it is no doubt pos-

sible, following the natural method, to go directly from One to three, four, 

or five, but only if there is a strong principal unity available, that of the piv-

otal taproot supporting the secondary roots. That doesn't get us very far. 

The binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced by biunivocal rela-

tionships between successive circles. The pivotal taproot provides no bet-

ter understanding of multiplicity than the dichotomous root. One operates 

in the object, the other in the subject. Binary logic and biunivocal relation-

ships still dominate psychoanalysis (the tree of delusion in the Freudian 

interpretation of Schreber's case), linguistics, structuralism, and even 

information science.

 

The radicle-system, or fascicular root, is the second figure of the book, 

to which our modernity pays willing allegiance. This time, the principal 

root has aborted, or its tip has been destroyed; an immediate, indefinite 

multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing 

development. This time, natural reality is what aborts the principal root, 

but the root's unity subsists, as past or yet to come, as possible. We must ask

 

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6 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

if reflexive, spiritual reality does not compensate for this state of things by 

demanding an even more comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive 

totality. Take William Burroughs's cut-up method: the folding of one text 

onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like 

a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under 

consideration. In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity contin-

ues its spiritual labor. That is why the most resolutely fragmented work can 

also be presented as the Total Work or Magnum Opus. Most modern meth-

ods for making series proliferate or a multiplicity grow are perfectly valid 

in one direction, for example, a linear direction, whereas a unity of 

totalization asserts itself even more firmly in another, circular or cyclic, 

dimension. Whenever a multiplicity is taken up in a structure, its growth is 

offset by a reduction in its laws of combination. The abortionists of unity 

are indeed angel makers, doctores angelici, because they affirm a properly 

angelic and superior unity. Joyce's words, accurately described as having 

"multiple roots," shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language, 

only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge. Nietzsche's 

aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic 

unity of the eternal return, present as the nonknown in thought. This is as 

much as to say that the fascicular system does not really break with dual-

ism, with the complementarity between a subject and an object, a natural 

reality and a spiritual reality: unity is consistently thwarted and obstructed 

in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject. The world 

has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes 

to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always sup-

plementary dimension to that of its object. The world has become chaos, 

but the book remains the image of the world: radicle-chaosmos rather than 

root-cosmos. A strange mystification: a book all the more total for being 

fragmented. At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the 

world. In truth, it is not enough to say, "Long live the multiple," difficult as 

it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical clever-

ness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made, not by always 

adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of 

sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available— 

always - 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always sub-

tracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write 

at - 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhi-

zome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. 

Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be 

rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant 

life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in 

their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their func-

 

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INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 7

 

tions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome 

itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all 

directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each 

other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, 

or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct 

feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approxi-

mate characteristics of the rhizome.

 

1 and 2. Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhi-

zome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very differ-

ent from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. The linguistic 

tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and proceeds by dichot-

omy. On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a 

linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very 

diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring 

into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of dif-

fering status. Collective assemblages of enunciation function directly 

within machinic assemblages; it is not impossible to make a radical break 

between regimes of signs and their objects. Even when linguistics claims to 

confine itself to what is explicit and to make no presuppositions about lan-

guage, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of 

assemblage and types of social power. Chomsky's grammaticality, the cate-

gorical S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a 

marker of power than a syntactic marker: you will construct grammatically 

correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a 

verb phrase (first dichotomy. . .). Our criticism of these linguistic models 

is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not 

abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects 

a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collec-

tive assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social 

field. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic 

chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sci-

ences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating 

very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, 

gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any lin-

guistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized 

languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a 

homogeneous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich's words, 

"an essentially heterogeneous reality."

1

 There is no mother tongue, only a 

power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. 

Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. 

It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train 

tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.

2

 It is always possible to break a language

 

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8

  □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

down into internal structural elements, an undertaking not fundamentally 

different from a search for roots. There is always something genealogical 

about a tree. It is not a method for the people. A method of the rhizome 

type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it onto 

other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon 

itself, except as a function of impotence.

 

3. Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is effectively 

treated as a substantive, "multiplicity," that it ceases to have any relation to 

the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world. 

Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent 

pseudomulti-plicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot 

in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort 

in the object or "return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject 

nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot 

increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws 

of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). 

Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed 

will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which 

form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first: "Call the 

strings or rods that move the puppet the weave. It might be objected that 
its multiplicity resides in the person of the actor, who projects it into the 

text. Granted; but the actor's nerve fibers in turn form a weave. And they 

fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated... . The 

interplay approximates the pure activity of weavers attributed in myth to 

the Fates or Norns."

3

 An assemblage is precisely this increase in the 

dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it 

expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, 

such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. When 

Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying 

virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the 

whole piece proliferate. The number is no longer a universal concept 

measuring elements according to their emplacement in a given dimension, 

but has itself become a multiplicity that varies according to the 

dimensions considered (the primacy of the domain over a complex of 

numbers attached to that domain). We do not have units (unites)  of 

measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement. The notion of 

unity  {unite)  appears only when there is a power takeover in the 

multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification 

proceeding: This is the case for a pivot-unity forming the basis for a set 

of biunivocal relationships between objective elements or points, or for the 

One that divides following the law of a binary logic of differentiation in the 

subject. Unity always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to 

that of the system considered (overcoding).

 

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The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be 

overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and 

above its number of lines, that is, over and above the multiplicity of num-

bers attached to those lines. All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they 

fill or occupy all of their dimensions: we will therefore speak of a plane of 
consistency 
of multiplicities, even though the dimensions of this "plane" 

increase with the number of connections that are made on it. Multiplicities 

are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or 

deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect 

with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of 

all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of 

dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a sup-

plementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of 

flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on 

a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of 

dimensions. The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane 

of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, his-

torical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations. 

Kleist invented a writing of this type, a broken chain of affects and variable 

speeds, with accelerations and transformations, always in a relation with 

the outside. Open rings. His texts, therefore, are opposed in every way to 

the classical or romantic book constituted by the interiority of a substance 

or subject. The war machine-book against the State apparatus-book. Flat 
multiplicities of n dimensions 
are asignifying and asubjective. They are 

designated by indefinite articles, or rather by partitives {some couchgrass, 
some of a rhizome . ..).

 

4. Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignifying breaks 

separating structures or cutting across a single structure. A rhizome may be 

broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old 

lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an 

animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been 

destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to 

which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., 

as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There 

is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line 

of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie 

back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichot-

omy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make 

a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will 

reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that 

restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject— 

anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups

 

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10 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize. Yes, 

couchgrass is also a rhizome. Good and bad are only the products of an 

active and temporary selection, which must be renewed.

 

How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of 

reterri-torialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one 

another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a 

wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is 

nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's 

reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting 

its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. 

It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in 

a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on 

the level of the strata—a parallelism between two strata such that a plant 

organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the 

same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a 

capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable 

becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the 

wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of 

one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings 

interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the 

deterritorialization ever further. There is neither imitation nor 

resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of 

flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to 

or subjugated by anything signifying. Rimy Chauvin expresses it well: "the 
aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with 

each other."

4

 More generally, evolutionary schemas may be forced to 

abandon the old model of the tree and descent. Under certain conditions, 

a virus can connect to germ cells and transmit itself as the cellular gene 

of a complex species; moreover, it can take flight, move into the cells of an 

entirely different species, but not without bringing with it "genetic 

information" from the first host (for example, Benveniste and Todaro's 

current research on a type C virus, with its double connection to baboon 

DNA and the DNA of certain kinds of domestic cats). Evolutionary 

schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent descent going from 

the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhizome operating 

immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already 

differentiated line to another.

5

 Once again, there is aparallel evolution, of 

the baboon and the cat; it is obvious that they are not models or copies of 

each other (a becoming-baboon in the cat does not mean that the cat 

"plays" baboon). We form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viruses 

cause us to form a rhizome with other animals. As Francois Jacob says, 

transfers of genetic material by viruses or through other procedures, 

fusions of cells originating in different species, have results analogous to

 

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NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 11

 

those of "the abominable couplings dear to antiquity and the Middle 

Ages."

6

 Transversal communications between different lines scramble the 

genealogical trees. Always look for the molecular, or even submolecular, 

particle with which we are allied. We evolve and die more from our 

polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or 

diseases that have their own line of descent. The rhizome is an 

anti-genealogy.

 

The same applies to the book and the world: contrary to a deeply rooted 

belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the 

world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book 

assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a 

reterri-torialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the 

world (if it is capable, if it can). Mimicry is a very bad concept, since it 

relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different 

nature. The crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the 

chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings. The Pink Panther 

imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on 

pink; this is its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes 

imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight, 

follows its "aparallel evolution" through to the end. The wisdom of the 

plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they 

form a rhizome with something else—with the wind, an animal, human 

beings (and there is also an aspect under which animals themselves form 

rhizomes, as do people, etc.). "Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of 

the plant in us." Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, 

and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most 

abstract and tortuous of lines of n  dimensions and broken directions. 

Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting 

a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive 

singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of 

convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the 

limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your 

territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where 

it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. 

"Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by 

the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the 

crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the 

flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your 

plant. All the devil's weed plants that are growing in between are yours. 

Later... you can extend the size of your territory by following the 

watercourse from each point along the way."

7

 Music has always sent out 

lines of flight, like so many "transformational multiplicities," even 

overturning the very codes that structure or

 

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2 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and prolif-

erations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome.

8

 

5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not 

amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea 

of genetic axis or deep structure. A genetic axis is like an objective pivotal 

unity upon which successive stages are organized; a deep structure is more 

like a base sequence that can be broken down into immediate constituents, 

while the unity of the product passes into another, transformational and 

subjective, dimension. This does not constitute a departure from the repre-

sentative model of the tree, or root—pivotal taproot or fascicles (for exam-

ple, Chomsky's "tree" is associated with a base sequence and represents the 

process of its own generation in terms of binary logic). A variation on the 

oldest form of thought. It is our view that genetic axis and profound struc-

ture are above all infinitely reproducible principles of tracing. All of tree 

logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics as in psychoanaly-

sis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative, crystallized 

into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed 

within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to 

maintain balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious 

that is already there from the start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory 

and language. It consists of tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure 

or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made. The tree articulates 

and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree.

 

The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a 

map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; 

it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map 

from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in 

contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed 

in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between 

fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum 

opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a 

part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimen-

sions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It 

can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an 

individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived 

of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Per-

haps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it 

always has multiple entryways; in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhi-

zome, and sometimes maintains a clear distinction between the line of 

flight as passageway and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). A map 

has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes 

back "to the same." The map has to do with performance, whereas the trac-

 

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NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 13

 

ing always involves an alleged "competence." Unlike psychoanalysis, psy-

choanalytic competence (which confines every desire and statement to a 

genetic axis or overcoding structure, and makes infinite, monotonous trac-

ings of the stages on that axis or the constituents of that structure), 

schizoanalysis rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name is 

given to it—divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural, hereditary, 

or syntagmatic. (It is obvious that Melanie Klein has no understanding of 

the cartography of one of her child patients, Little Richard, and is content 

to make ready-made tracings—Oedipus, the good daddy and the bad 

daddy, the bad mommy and the good mommy—while the child makes a 

desperate attempt to carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst 

totally misconstrues.)

9

 Drives and part-objects are neither stages on a 

genetic axis nor positions in a deep structure; they are political options for 

problems, they are entryways and exits, impasses the child lives out politi-

cally, in other words, with all the force of his or her desire.

 

Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps 

to tracings, as good and bad sides? Is it not of the essence of the map to be 

traceable? Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect roots and 

sometimes merge with them? Does not a map contain phenomena of 

redundancy that are already like tracings of its own? Does not a multipli-

city have strata upon which unifications and totalizations, massifications, 

mimetic mechanisms, signifying power takeovers, and subjective attribu-

tions take root? Do not even lines of flight, due to their eventual diver-

gence, reproduce the very formations their function it was to dismantle or 

outflank? But the opposite is also true. It is a question of method: the trac-
ing should always be put back on the map. 
This operation and the previous 

one are not at all symmetrical. For it is inaccurate to say that a tracing 

reproduces the map. It is instead like a photograph or X ray that begins by 

selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as colorations or other 

restrictive procedures, what it intends to reproduce. The imitator always 

creates the model, and attracts it. The tracing has already translated the 

map into an image; it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and 

radicles. It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities accord-

ing to the axes of signifiance and subjectification belonging to it. It has gen-

erated, structurahzed the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing 

something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the tracing is 

so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the trac-

ing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, 

incipient taproots, or points of structuration. Take a look at psychoanalysis 

and linguistics: all the former has ever made are tracings or photos of the 

unconscious, and the latter of language, with all the betrayals that implies 

(it's not surprising that psychoanalysis tied its fate to that of linguistics).

 

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4 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child psycho-

analysis at its purest: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING 

HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he 

began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and 

guilt in him, PHOBIA (they barred him from the rhizome of the building, 

then from the rhizome of the street, they rooted him in his parents' bed, 

they radicled him to his own body, they fixated him on Professor Freud). 

Freud explicitly takes Little Hans's cartography into account, but always 

and only in order to project it back onto the family photo. And look what 

Melanie Klein did to Little Richard's geopolitical maps: she developed 

photos from them, made tracings of them. Strike the pose or follow the 

axis, genetic stage or structural destiny—one way or the other, your rhi-

zome will be broken. You will be allowed to live and speak, but only after 

every outlet has been obstructed. Once a rhizome has been obstructed, 

arborified, it's all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire 

moves and produces. Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercus-

sions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts 

on desire by external, productive outgrowths.

 

That is why it is so important to try the other, reverse but nonsym-

metrical, operation. Plug the tracings back into the map, connect the roots 

or trees back up with a rhizome. In the case of Little Hans, studying the 

unconscious would be to show how he tries to build a rhizome, with the 

family house but also with the line of flight of the building, the street, etc.; 

how these lines are blocked, how the child is made to take root in the family, 

be photographed under the father, be traced onto the mother's bed; then 

how Professor Freud's intervention assures a power takeover by the 

signifier, a subjectification of affects; how the only escape route left to the 

child is a becoming-animal perceived as shameful and guilty (the 

becoming-horse of Little Hans, a truly political option). But these impasses 

must always be resituated on the map, thereby opening them up to possible 

lines of flight. The same applies to the group map: show at what point in the 

rhizome there form phenomena of massification, bureaucracy, leadership, 

fascization, etc., which lines nevertheless survive, if only underground, 

continuing to make rhizome in the shadows. Deligny's method: map the 

gestures and movements of an autistic child, combine several maps for the 

same child, for several different children.

10

 If it is true that it is of the 

essence of the map or rhizome to have multiple entryways, then it is plausi-

ble that one could even enter them through tracings or the root-tree, assum-

ing the necessary precautions are taken (once again, one must avoid any 

Manichaean dualism). For example, one will often be forced to take dead 

ends, to work with signifying powers and subjective affections, to find a 

foothold in formations that are Oedipal or paranoid or even worse,

 

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NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME D 15

 

rigidified territorialities that open the way for other transformational 

operations. It is even possible for psychoanalysis to serve as a foothold, in 

spite of itself. In other cases, on the contrary, one will bolster oneself 

directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and 

make new connections. Thus, there are very diverse map-tracing, 

rhizome-root assemblages, with variable coefficients of 

deterritorialization. There exist tree or root structures in rhizomes; 

conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a 

rhizome. The coordinates are determined not by theoretical analyses 

implying universals but by a pragmatics composing multiplicities or 

aggregates of intensities. A new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree, 

the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch. Or else it is a microscopic 

element of the root-tree, a radicle, that gets rhizome production going. 

Accounting and bureaucracy proceed by tracings: they can begin to 

burgeon nonetheless, throwing out rhizome stems, as in a Kafka novel. 

An intensive trait starts working for itself, a hallucinatory perception, 

synesthesia, perverse mutation, or play of images shakes loose, challenging 

the hegemony of the signifier. In the case of the child, gestural, mimetic, 

ludic, and other semiotic systems regain their freedom and extricate 

themselves from the "tracing," that is, from the dominant competence of 

the teacher's language—a microscopic event upsets the local balance of 

power. Similarly, generative trees constructed according to Chomsky's 

syntagmatic model can open up in all directions, and in turn form a rhi-

zome.

11

 To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem 

to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but 

put them to strange new uses. We're tired of trees. We should stop believing 

in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of 

arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Noth-

ing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and 

aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes. Amsterdam, a city 

entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its stem-canals, where utility 

connects with the greatest folly in relation to a commercial war machine. 

Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified 

matter. What are wrongly called "dendrites" do not assure the connection 

of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role 

of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic 

microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the 

brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a 

whole uncertain, probabilistic system ("the uncertain nervous system"). 

Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much 

more a grass than a tree. "The axon and the dendrite twist around each 

other like bindweed around brambles, with synapses at each of the 

thorns."

12

 The same goes for memory. Neurologists and psychophysiolo-

 

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16 D INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

gists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (on 

the order of a minute). The difference between them is not simply quantita-

tive: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-term 

memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or pho-

tograph). Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or 

immediacy to its object; it can act at a distance, come or return a long time 

after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multipli-

city. Furthermore, the difference between the two kinds of memory is not 

that of two temporal modes of apprehending the same thing; they do not 

grasp the same thing, memory, or idea. The splendor of the short-term 

Idea: one writes using short-term memory, and thus short-term ideas, even 

if one reads or rereads using long-term memory of long-term concepts. 

Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the 

instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. 

Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and trans-

lates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, offbeat, 

in an "untimely" way, not instantaneously.

 

The tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating 

the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity. If we con-

sider the set, branches-roots, the trunk plays the role of opposed segment 

for one of the subsets running from bottom to top: this kind of segment is a 

"link dipole," in contrast to the "unit dipoles" formed by spokes radiating 

from a single center.

13

 Even if the links themselves proliferate, as in the 

radicle system, one can never get beyond the One-Two, and fake multiplici-

ties. Regenerations, reproductions, returns, hydras, and medusas do not 

get us any further. Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with cen-

ters of signifiance and subjectification, central automata like organized 

memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives infor-

mation from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along 

preestablished paths. This is evident in current problems in information 

science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of 

thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ. Pierre 

Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, in a fine article denouncing "the imagery of 

command trees" (centered systems or hierarchical structures), note that 

"accepting the primacy of hierarchical structures amounts to giving 

arborescent structures privileged status.... The arborescent form admits of 

topological explanation.... In a hierarchical system, an individual has only 

one active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior.... The channels of 

transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the 

individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place" (signifiance and 

subjectification). The authors point out that even when one thinks one has 

reached a multiplicity, it may be a false one—of what we call the radicle

 

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NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 17

 

type—because its ostensibly nonhierarchical presentation or statement in 

fact only admits of a totally hierarchical solution. An example is the 

famous friendship theorem: "If any two given individuals in a society have 

precisely one mutual friend, then there exists an individual who is the 

friend of all the others." (Rosenstiehl and Petitot ask who that mutual 

friend is. Who is "the universal friend in this society of couples: the master, 

the confessor, the doctor? These ideas are curiously far removed from the 

initial axioms." Who is this friend of humankind? Is it the .pMosopher as 

he appears in classical thought, even if he is an aborted unity that makes 

itself felt only through its absence or subjectivity, saying all the while, I 

know nothing, I am nothing?) Thus the authors speak of dictatorship theo-

rems. Such is indeed the principle of roots-trees, or their outcome: the 

radicle solution, the structure of Power.

14

 

To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems, 

finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neigh-

bor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals 

are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment—such 

that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result syn-

chronized without a central agency. Transduction of intensive states 

replaces topology, and "the graph regulating the circulation of information 

is in a way the opposite of the hierarchical graph.. . . There is no reason for 

the graph to be a tree" (we have been calling this kind of graph a map). The 

problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for 

individuals to manage to fire in unison? The solution without a General is 

to be found in an acentered multiplicity possessing a finite number of 

states with signals to indicate corresponding speeds, from a war rhizome or 

guerrilla logic point of view, without any tracing, without any copying of a 

central order. The authors even demonstrate that this kind of machinic 

multiplicity, assemblage, or society rejects any centralizing or unifying 

automaton as an "asocial intrusion."

15

 Under these conditions, is in fact 

always  n  - 1. Rosenstiehl and Petitot emphasize that the opposition, 

centered-acentered, is valid less as a designation for things than as a mode 

of calculation applied to things. Trees may correspond to the rhizome, or 

they may burgeon into a rhizome. It is true that the same thing is generally 

susceptible to both modes of calculation or both types of regulation, but 

not without undergoing a change in state. Take psychoanalysis as an exam-

ple again: it subjects the unconscious to arborescent structures, hierarchi-

cal graphs, recapitulatory memories, central organs, the phallus, the 

phallus-tree—not only in its theory but also in its practice of calculation 

and treatment. Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this regard: it 

bases its own dictatorial power upon a dictatorial conception of the uncon-

scious. Psychoanalysis's margin of maneuverability is therefore very

 

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18 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

limited. In both psychoanalysis and its object, there is always a general, 

always a leader (General Freud). Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, treats 

the unconscious as an acentered system, in other words, as a machinic net-

work of finite automata (a rhizome), and thus arrives at an entirely differ-

ent state of the unconscious. These same remarks apply to linguistics; 

Rosenstiehl and Petitot are right to bring up the possibility of an 

"acentered organization of a society of words." For both statements and 

desires, the issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to 

make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to produce the uncon-
scious, 
and with it new statements, different desires: the rhizome is pre-

cisely this production of the unconscious.

 

It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western 

thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theol-

ogy, ontology, all of philosophy . ..: the root-foundation, Grund, racine, 
fondement. 
The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation; 

the fields carved from the forest are populated with seed plants produced 

by cultivation based on species lineages of the arborescent type; animal 

raising, carried out on fallow fields, selects lineages forming an entire ani-

mal arborescence. The East presents a different figure: a relation to the 

steppe and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather 

than forest and field; cultivation of tubers by fragmentation of the individ-

ual; a casting aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is confined to 

closed spaces or pushed out onto the steppes of the nomads. The West: agri-

culture based on a chosen lineage containing a large number of variable 

individuals. The East: horticulture based on a small number of individuals 

derived from a wide range of "clones." Does not the East, Oceania in par-

ticular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect 

to the Western model of the tree? Andre Haudricourt even sees this as the 

basis for the opposition between the moralities or philosophies of tran-

scendence dear to the West and the immanent ones of the East: the God 

who sows and reaps, as opposed to the God who replants and unearths 

(replanting of offshoots versus sowing of seeds).

16

 Transcendence: a specif-

ically European disease. Neither is music the same, the music of the earth is 

different, as is sexuality: seed plants, even those with two sexes in the same 

plant, subjugate sexuality to the reproductive model; the rhizome, on the 

other hand, is a liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also 

from genitality. Here in the West, the tree has implanted itself in our bod-

ies, rigidifying and stratifying even the sexes. We have lost the rhizome, or 

the grass. Henry Miller: "China is the weed in the human cabbage patch. 

... The weed is the Nemesis of human endeavor.... Of all the imaginary 

existences we attribute to plant, beast and star the weed leads the most sat-

isfactory life of all. True, the weed produces no lilies, no battleships, no Ser-

 

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NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 19

 

mons on the Mount.... Eventually the weed gets the upper hand. Eventu-

ally things fall back into a state of China. This condition is usually referred 

to by historians as the Dark Age. Grass is the only way out.... The weed 

exists only to fill the waste spaces left by cultivated areas. It grows between, 

among other things. The lily is beautiful, the cabbage is provender, the 

poppy is maddening—but the weed is rank growth ...: it points a 

moral."

17

 Which China is Miller talking about? The old China, the new, an 

imaginary one, or yet another located on a shifting map?

 

America is a special case. Of course it is not immune from domination 

by trees or the search for roots. This is evident even in the literature, in the 

quest for a national identity and even for a European ancestry or genealogy 

(Kerouac going off in search of his ancestors). Nevertheless, everything 

important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the Ameri-

can rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive 

lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside. American 

books are different from European books, even when the American sets off 

in pursuit of trees. The conception of the book is different. Leaves of Grass. 

And directions in America are different: the search for arborescence and 

the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic 

West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting 

and displaced frontiers. There is a whole American "map" in the West, 

where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions: it put 

its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came 

full circle; its West is the edge of the East.

18

 (India is not the intermediary 

between the Occident and the Orient, as Haudricourt believed: America is 

the pivot point and mechanism of reversal.) The American singer Patti 

Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don't go for the root, follow 

the canal...

 

Are there not also two kinds of bureaucracy, or even three (or still more)? 

Western bureaucracy: its agrarian, cadastral origins; roots and fields; trees 

and their role as frontiers; the great census of William the Conqueror; feu-

dalism; the policies of the kings of France; making property the basis of the 

State; negotiating land through warfare, litigation, and marriages. The 

kings of France chose the lily because it is a plant with deep roots that clings 

to slopes. Is bureaucracy the same in the Orient? Of course it is all too easy 

to depict an Orient of rhizomes and immanence; yet it is true that in the 

Orient the State does not act following a schema of arborescence corre-

sponding to preestablished, arborified, and rooted classes; its bureaucracy 

is one of channels, for example, the much-discussed case of hydraulic 

power with "weak property," in which the State engenders channeled and 

channelizing classes (cf. the aspects of Wittfogel's work that have not been 

refuted).

19

 The despot acts as a river, not as a fountainhead, which is still a

 

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0 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

point, a tree-point or root; he flows with the current rather than sitting 

under a tree; Buddha's tree itself becomes a rhizome; Mao's river and 

Louis's tree. Has not America acted as an intermediary here as well? For it 

proceeds both by internal exterminations and liquidations (not only the 

Indians but also the farmers, etc.), and by successive waves of immigration 

from the outside. The flow of capital produces an immense channel, a 

quantification of power with immediate "quanta," where each person 

profits from the passage of the money flow in his or her own way (hence the 

reality-myth of the poor man who strikes it rich and then falls into poverty 

again): in America everything comes together, tree and channel, root and 

rhizome. There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself; 

capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations, it is neocapitalism 

by nature. It invents its eastern face and western face, and reshapes them 

both—all for the worst.

 

At the same time, we are on the wrong track with all these geographical 

distributions. An impasse. So much the better. If it is a question of showing 

that rhizomes also have their own, even more rigid, despotism and hierar-

chy, then fine and good: for there is no dualism, no ontological dualism 

between here and there, no axiological dualism between good and bad, no 

blend or American synthesis. There are knots of arborescence in rhizomes, 

and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. Moreover, there are despotic formations 

of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes, just as there are 

anarchic deformations in the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots, 

and subterranean stems. The important point is that the root-tree and 

canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a tran-

scendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the sec-

ond operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and 

outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise 

to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of 

a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a 

question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of 

a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up 

again. No, this is not a new or different dualism. The problem of writing: in 

order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly 

unavoidable. Not at all because it is a necessary step, or because one can 

only advance by approximations: anexactitude is in no way an approxima-

tion; on the contrary, it is the exact passage of that which is under way. We 

invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We employ a dual-

ism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models. 

Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms we had 

no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the magic 

formula we all seek—

PLURALISM 

MONISM

—via all the dualisms that are

 

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NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 21

 

the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever 

rearranging.

 

Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees 

or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its 

traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into 

play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome 

is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that 

becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple 

derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not 

of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither 

beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and 

which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with dimensions 

having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of con-

sistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n - 1). When a mul-

tiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as 

well, undergoes a metamorphosis. Unlike a structure, which is defined by a 

set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and 

biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only 

of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the 

line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after 

which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature. 

These lines, or lineaments, should not be confused with lineages of the 

arborescent type, which are merely localizable linkages between points and 

positions. Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction: 

neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as 

tree-structure. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, 

or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, 

capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, 

unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, con-

structed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, 

modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of 

flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In con-

trast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of 

communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, 

nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an 

organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation 

of states. What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality—but 

also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural 

and artificial—that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all 

manner of "becomings."

 

A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhi-

zome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word "plateau" to

 

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2 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of 

intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmina-

tion point or external end. Bateson cites Balinese culture as an example: 

mother-child sexual games, and even quarrels among men, undergo this 

bizarre intensive stabilization. "Some sort of continuing plateau of inten-

sity is substituted for [sexual] climax," war, or a culmination point. It is a 

regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and 

actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a 

plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value.

20

 For example, a 

book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What 

takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with 

one another across microfissures, as in a brain? We call a "plateau" any 

multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground 

stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this 

book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular 

form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us 

would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines 

here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave 

one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. We made cir-

cles of convergence. Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be 

related to any other plateau. To attain the multiple, one must have a 

method that effectively constructs it; no typographical cleverness, no lexi-

cal agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness, can 

substitute for it. In fact, these are more often than not merely mimetic pro-

cedures used to disseminate or disperse a unity that is retained in a differ-

ent dimension for an image-book. Technonarcissism. Typographical, 

lexical, or syntactic creations are necessary only when they no longer 

belong to the form of expression of a hidden unity, becoming themselves 

dimensions of the multiplicity under consideration; we only know of rare 

successes in this.

21

 We ourselves were unable to do it. We just used words 

that in turn function for us as plateaus. RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS = 

STRATOA

NALYSIS 

PRAGMATICS 

MICROPOLITICS

.

 

These words are con-

cepts, but concepts are lines, which is to say, number systems attached to a 

particular dimension of the multiplicities (strata, molecular chains, lines 

of flight or rupture, circles of convergence, etc.). Nowhere do we claim for 

our concepts the title of a science. We are no more familiar with 

scientif-icity than we are with ideology; all we know are assemblages. And 

the only assemblages are machinic assemblages of desire and collective 

assemblages of enunciation. No signifiance, no subjectification: writing 

to the «th power (all individuated enunciation remains trapped within the 

dominant significations, all signifying desire is associated with dominated 

subjects). An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic 

flows,

 

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NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 23

 

material flows, and social flows simultaneously (independently of any 

recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus). 

There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) 

and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the 

author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain 

multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel 

nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. In short, 

we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The 

outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity. The book as assem-

blage with the outside, against the book as image of the world. A 

rhizome-book, not a dichotomous, pivotal, or fascicular book. Never send 

down roots, or plant them, however difficult it may be to avoid reverting 

to the old procedures. "Those things which occur to me, occur to me not 

from the root up but rather only from somewhere about their middle. Let 

someone then attempt to seize them, let someone attempt to seize a blade 

of grass and hold fast to it when it begins to grow only from the middle."

22

 

Why is this so difficult? The question is directly one of perceptual 

semiotics. It's not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down 

on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right 

to left: try it, you'll see that everything changes. It's not easy to see the grass 

in things and in words (similarly, Nietzsche said that an aphorism had to 

be "ruminated"; never is a plateau separable from the cows that populate 

it, which are also the clouds in the sky).

 

History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the 

name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the 

topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history. 

There are rare successes in this also, for example, on the subject of the 

Children's Crusades: Marcel Schwob's book multiplies narratives like so 

many plateaus with variable numbers of dimensions. Then there is 

Andrzejewski's book, Les portes du paradis (The gates of paradise), com-

posed of a single uninterrupted sentence; a flow of children; a flow of walk-

ing with pauses, straggling, and forward rushes; the semiotic flow of the 

confessions of all the children who go up to the old monk at the head of the 

procession to make their declarations; a flow of desire and sexuality, each 

child having left out of love and more or less directly led by the dark posthu-

mous pederastic desire of the count of Vendome; all this with circles of con-

vergence. What is important is not whether the flows are "One or 

multiple"—we're past that point: there is a collective assemblage of enun-

ciation, a machinic assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both 

plugged into an immense outside that is a multiplicity in any case. A more 

recent example is Armand Farrachi's book on the Fourth Crusade, La dis-
location, 
in which the sentences space themselves out and disperse, or else

 

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2

4 □ INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME

 

jostle together and coexist, and in which the letters, the typography begin 

to dance as the crusade grows more delirious.

23

 These are models of 

nomadic and rhizomatic writing. Writing weds a war machine and lines of 

flight, abandoning the strata, segmentarities, sedentarity, the State 

apparatus. But why is a model still necessary? Aren't these books still 

"images" of the Crusades? Don't they still retain a unity, in Schwob's case a 

pivotal unity, in Farrachi's an aborted unity, and in the most beautiful 

example, Les portes du paradis, the unity of the funereal count? Is there a 

need for a more profound nomadism than that of the Crusades, a 

nomadism of true nomads, or of those who no longer even move or imitate 

anything? The nomadism of those who only assemble (agencent). How can 

the book find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, 

rather than a world to reproduce? The cultural book is necessarily a tracing: 

already a tracing of itself, a tracing of the previous book by the same author, 

a tracing of other books however different they may be, an endless tracing 

of established concepts and words, a tracing of the world present, past, and 

future. Even the anticultural book may still be burdened by too heavy a cul-

tural load: but it will use it actively, for forgetting instead of remembering, 

for underdevelopment instead of progress toward development, in 

nomadism rather than sedentarity, to make a map instead of a tracing. 

RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do 

besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or 

pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous. For science 

would go completely mad if left to its own devices. Look at mathematics: 

it's not a science, it's a monster slang, it's nomadic. Even in the realm of 

theory, especially in the realm of theory, any precarious and pragmatic 

framework is better than tracing concepts, with their breaks and progress 

changing nothing. Imperceptible rupture, not signifying break. The 

nomads invented a war machine in opposition to the State apparatus. 

History has never comprehended nomadism, the book has never 

comprehended the outside. The State as the model for the book and for 

thought has a long history: logos, the philosopher-king, the transcendence 

of the Idea, the interiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the court 

of reason, the functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject. The 

State's pretension to be a world order, and to root man. The war machine's 

relation to an outside is not another "model"; it is an assemblage that 

makes thought itself nomadic, and the book a working part in every 

mobile machine, a stem for a rhizome (Kleist and Kafka against Goethe).

 

Write to the nth power, the - 1 power, write with slogans: Make rhi-

zomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be one or 

multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the 

point into a line!

24

 Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line

 

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INTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 25

 

of hips, line of flight. Don't bring out the General in you! Don't have just 

ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not 

photos or drawings. Be the Pink Panther and your loves will be like the 

wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon. As they say about old man 

river:

 

He don't plant 'tatos

 

Don't plant cotton

 

Them that plants them is soon forgotten

 

But old man river he just keeps rollin' along

 

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between 

things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alli-

ance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of 

the rhizome is the conjunction, "and. . . and.. . and. . ." This conjunction 

carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb "to be." Where are you 

going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are 

totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again 

from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation—all imply a false 

conception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, ped-

agogical, initiatory, symbolic...). But Kleist, Lenz, and Biichner have 

another way of traveling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through 

the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing.

25

 Ameri-

can literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic 

direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things, 

establish a logic of the 

AND

,

 

overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, 

nullify endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics. 

The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things 

pick up speed. Between  things does not designate a localizable relation 

going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular 

direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a 

stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up 

speed in the middle.

 

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2. 1914: One or Several Wolves?

 

 

Field of Tracks, or Wolf Line

 

That day, the Wolf-Man rose from the couch particularly tired. He knew 
that Freud had a genius for brushing up against the truth and passing it by, 
then filling the void with associations. He knew that Freud knew nothing 
about wolves, or anuses for that matter. The only thing Freud understood 
was what a dog is, and a dog's tail. It wasn't enough. It wouldn't be enough. 
The Wolf-Man knew that Freud would soon declare him cured, but that it 
was not at all the case and his treatment would continue for all eternity 
under Brunswick, Lacan, Leclaire. Finally, he knew that he was in the pro-
cess of acquiring a veritable proper name, the Wolf-Man, a name more 
properly his than his own, since it attained the highest degree of singularity

 

26

 

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914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? □ 27

 

in the instantaneous apprehension of a generic multiplicity: wolves. He 

knew that this new and true proper name would be disfigured and mis-

spelled, retranscribed as a patronymic.

 

Freud, for his part, would go on to write some extraordinary pages. 

Entirely practical pages: his article of 1915 on "The Unconscious," which 

deals with the difference between neurosis and psychosis. Freud says that 

hysterics or obsessives are people capable of making a global comparison 

between a sock and a vagina, a scar and castration, etc. Doubtless, it is at 

one and the same time that they apprehend the object globally and perceive 

it as lost. Yet it would never occur to a neurotic to grasp the skin erotically 

as a multiplicity of pores, little spots, little scars or black holes, or to grasp 

the sock erotically as a multiplicity of stitches. The psychotic can: "we 

should expect the multiplicity of these little cavities to prevent him from 

using them as substitutes for the female genital."

1

 Comparing a sock to a 

vagina is OK, it's done all the time, but you'd have to be insane to compare 

a pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas: that's what Freud says. 

This represents an important clinical discovery: a whole difference in style 

between neurosis and psychosis. For example, Salvador Dali, in attempt-

ing to reproduce his delusions, may go on at length about THE rhinoceros 

horn; he has not for all of that left neurotic discourse behind. But when he 

starts comparing goosebumps to a field of tiny rhinoceros horns, we get the 

feeling that the atmosphere has changed and that we are now in the pres-

ence of madness. Is it still a question of a comparison at all? It is, rather, a 

pure multiplicity that changes elements, or becomes. On the micrological 

level, the little bumps "become" horns, and the horns, little penises.

 

No sooner does Freud discover the greatest art of the unconscious, this 

art of molecular multiplicities, than we find him tirelessly at work bringing 

back molar unities, reverting to his familiar themes of the father, the penis, 
the vagina, Castration with a capital C... (On the verge of discovering a 

rhizome, Freud always returns to mere roots.) The reductive procedure of 

the 1915 article is quite interesting: he says that the comparisons and iden-

tifications of the neurotic are guided by representations of things, whereas 

all the psychotic has left are representations of words (for example, the 

word "hole"). "What has dictated the substitution is not the resemblance 

between the things denoted but the sameness of the words used to express 

them" (p. 201). Thus, when there is no unity in the thing, there is at least 

unity and identity in the word. It will be noted that names are taken in their 
extensive usage, in other words, function as common nouns ensuring the 

unification of an aggregate they subsume. The proper name can be nothing 

more than an extreme case of the common noun, containing its already 

domesticated multiplicity within itself and linking it to a being or object 

posited as unique. This jeopardizes, on the side of words and things both,

 

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8 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

 

the relation of the proper name as an intensity to the multiplicity it instan-
taneously apprehends. For Freud, when the thing splinters and loses its 
identity, the word is still there to restore that identity or invent a new one. 
Freud counted on the word to reestablish a unity no longer found in things. 
Are we not witnessing the first stirrings of a subsequent adventure, that of 
the  Signifier, the devious despotic agency that substitutes itself for 
asignifying proper names and replaces multiplicities with the dismal unity 
of an object declared lost?

 

We're not far from wolves. For the Wolf-Man, in his second so-called 

psychotic episode, kept constant watch over the variations or changing 
path of the little holes or scars on the skin of his nose. During the first epi-
sode, which Freud declares neurotic, he recounted a dream he had about 
six or seven wolves in a tree, and drew five. Who is ignorant of the fact that 
wolves travel in packs? Only Freud. Every child knows it. Not Freud. With 
false scruples he asks, How are we to explain the fact that there are five, six, 
or seven wolves in this dream? He has decided that this is neurosis, so he 
uses the other reductive procedure: free association on the level of the rep-
resentation of things, rather than verbal subsumption on the level of the 
representation of words. The result is the same, since it is always a question 
of bringing back the unity or identity of the person or allegedly lost object. 
The wolves will have to be purged of their multiplicity. This operation is 
accomplished by associating the dream with the tale, "The Wolf and the 
Seven Kid-Goats" (only six of which get eaten). We witness Freud's reduc-
tive glee; we literally see multiplicity leave the wolves to take the shape of 
goats that have absolutely nothing to do with the story. Seven wolves that 
are only kid-goats. Six wolves: the seventh goat (the Wolf-Man himself) is 
hiding in the clock. Five wolves: he may have seen his parents make love at 
five o'clock, and the roman numeral V is associated with the erotic spread-
ing of a woman's legs. Three wolves: the parents may have made love three 
times. Two wolves: the first coupling the child may have seen was the two 
parents more ferarum, or perhaps even two dogs. One wolf: the wolf is the 
father, as we all knew from the start. Zero wolves: he lost his tail, he is not 
just a castrater but also castrated. Who is Freud trying to fool? The wolves 
never had a chance to get away and save their pack: it was already decided 
from the very beginning that animals could serve only to represent coitus 
between parents, or, conversely, be represented by coitus between parents. 
Freud obviously knows nothing about the fascination exerted by wolves 
and the meaning of their silent call, the call to become-wolf. Wolves watch, 
intently watch, the dreaming child; it is so much more reassuring to tell 
oneself that the dream produced a reversal and that it is really the child who 
sees dogs or parents in the act of making love. Freud only knows the

 

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914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? D 29

 

Oedipalized wolf or dog, the castrated-castrating daddy-wolf, the dog in 

the kennel, the analyst's bow-wow.

 

Franny is listening to a program on wolves. I say to her, Would you like to 

be a wolf? She answers haughtily, How stupid, you can't be one wolf, you're 

always eight or nine, six or seven. Not six or seven wolves all by yourself all 

at once, but one wolf among others, with five or six others. In 

becoming-wolf, the important thing is the position of the mass, and above 

all the position of the subject itself in relation to the pack or 

wolf-multiplicity: how the subject joins or does not join the pack, how far 

away it stays, how it does or does not hold to the multiplicity. To soften 

the harshness of her response, Franny recounts a dream: "There is a 

desert. Again, it wouldn't make any sense to say that I am in the desert. It's 

a panoramic vision of the desert, and it's not a tragic or uninhabited desert. 

It's only a desert because of its ocher color and its blazing, shadowless 

sun. There is a teeming crowd in it, a swarm of bees, a rumble of soccer 

players, oragroup of Tuareg. lam on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; 
but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or 
foot. 
I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if 

I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as certainly if I let 

go of the crowd. This is not an easy position to stay in, it is even very 

difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant motion and their 

movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm. They swirl, go 

north, then suddenly east; none of the individuals in the crowd remains 

in the same place in relation to the others. So I too am in perpetual 

motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of 

violent, almost vertiginous, happiness." A very good schizo dream. To be 

fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it, removed 

from it: to be on the edge, to take a walk like Virginia Woolf (never again 

will I say, "I am this, I am thai").

1

 

Problems of peopling in the unconscious: all that passes through the 

pores of the schizo, the veins of the drug addict, swarming, teeming, fer-

ment, intensities, races and tribes. This tale of white skin prickling with 

bumps and pustules, and of dwarfish black heads emerging from pores gri-

macing and abominable, needing to be shaved off every morning—is it a 

tale by Jean Ray, who knew how to bring terror to phenomena of 

micromultiplicity? And how about the "Lilliputian hallucinations" on 

ether? One schizo, two schizos, three: "There are babies growing in my 

every pore"—"With me, it's not in the pores, it's in my veins, little iron 

rods growing in my veins"—"I don't want them to give me any shots, 

except with camphorated alcohol. Otherwise breasts grow in my every 

pore." Freud tried to approach crowd phenomena from the point of view of 

the unconscious, but he did not see clearly, he did not see that the uncon-

scious itself was fundamentally a crowd. He was myopic and hard of

 

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3

0 D 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

 

hearing; he mistook crowds for a single person. Schizos, on the other hand, 

have sharp eyes and ears. They don't mistake the buzz and shove of the 

crowd for daddy's voice. Once Jung had a dream about bones and skulls. A 

bone or a skull is never alone. Bones are a multiplicity. But Freud wants the 

dream to signify the death of someone. "Jung was surprised and pointed 

out that there were several skulls, not just one. Yet Freud still. . ."

3

 

A multiplicity of pores, or blackheads, of little scars or stitches. Breasts, 

babies, and rods. A multiplicity of bees, soccer players, or Tuareg. A multi-

plicity of wolves or jackals ... All of these things are irreducible but bring 

us to a certain status of the formations of the unconscious. Let us try to 

define the factors involved: first, something plays the role of the full 

body—the body without organs. In the preceding dream it was the desert. 

In the Wolf-Man's dream it is the denuded tree upon which the wolves are 

perched. It is also the skin as envelope or ring, and the sock as reversible 

surface. It can be a house or part of a house, any number of things, any-

thing. Whenever someone makes love, really makes love, that person con-

stitutes a body without organs, alone and with the other person or people. 

A body without organs is not an empty body stripped of organs, but a body 

upon which that which serves as organs (wolves, wolf eyes, wolf jaws?) is 

distributed according to crowd phenomena, in Brownian motion, in the 

form of molecular multiplicities. The desert is populous. Thus the body 

without organs is opposed less to organs as such than to the organization of 

the organs insofar as it composes an organism. The body without organs is 

not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has 

blown apart the organism and its organization. Lice hopping on the beach. 

Skin colonies. The full body without organs is a body populated by multi-

plicities. The problem of the unconscious has most certainly nothing to do 

with generation but rather peopling, population. It is an affair of world-

wide population on the full body of the earth, not organic familial genera-

tion. "I love to invent peoples, tribes, racial origins ... I return from my 

tribes. As of today, I am the adoptive son of fifteen tribes, no more, no less. 

And they in turn are my adopted tribes, for I love each of them more than if 

I had been born into it." People say, After all, schizophrenics have a mother 

and a father, don't they? Sorry, no, none as such. They only have a desert 

with tribes inhabiting it, a full body clinging with multiplicities.

 

This brings us to the second factor, the nature of these multiplicities and 

their elements. RHIZOME. One of the essential characteristics of the dream 

of multiplicity is that each element ceaselessly varies and alters its distance 

in relation to the others. On the Wolf-Man's nose, the elements, deter-

mined as pores in the skin, little scars in the pores, little ruts in the scar tis-

sue, ceaselessly dance, grow, and diminish. These variable distances are 

not extensive quantities divisible by each other; rather, each is indivisible,

 

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914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? □ 31

 

or "relatively indivisible," in other words, they are not divisible below or 

above a certain threshold, they cannot increase or diminish without their 
elements changing in nature. 
A swarm of bees: here they come as a rumble 

of soccer players in striped jerseys, or a band of Tuareg. Or: the wolf clan 

doubles up with a swarm of bees against the gang of Deulhs, under the 

direction of Mowgli, who runs on the edge (yes, Kipling understood the call 

of the wolves, their libidinal meaning, better than Freud; and in the 

Wolf-Man's case the story about wolves is followed by one about wasps 

and butterflies, we go from wolves to wasps). What is the significance of 

these indivisible distances that are ceaselessly transformed, and cannot be 

divided or transformed without their elements changing in nature each 

time? Is it not the intensive character of this kind of multiplicity's elements 

and the relations between them? Exactly like a speed or a temperature, 

which is not composed of other speeds and temperatures but rather is 

enveloped in or envelops others, each of which marks a change in nature. 

The metrical principle of these multiplicities is not to be found in a homo-

geneous milieu but resides elsewhere, in forces at work within them, in 

physical phenomena inhabiting them, precisely in the libido, which consti-

tutes them from within, and in constituting them necessarily divides into 

distinct qualitative and variable flows. Freud himself recognizes the multi-

plicity of libidinal "currents" that coexist in the Wolf-Man. That makes it 

all the more surprising that he treats the multiplicities of the unconscious 

the way he does. For him, there will always be a reduction to the One: the little 

scars, the little holes, become subdivisions of the great scar or supreme 

hole named castration; the wolves become substitutes for a single Father 

who turns up everywhere, or wherever they put him. (As Ruth Mack 

Brunswick says, Let's go all the way, the wolves are "all the fathers and doc-

tors" in the world; but the Wolf-Man thinks, "You trying to tell me my ass 

isn't a wolf?")

 

What should have been done is the opposite, all of this should be under-

stood in intensity: the Wolf is the pack, in other words, the multiplicity 

instantaneously apprehended as such insofar as it approaches or moves 

away from zero, each distance being nondecomposable. Zero is the body 

without organs of the Wolf-Man. If the unconscious knows nothing of 

negation, it is because there is nothing negative in the unconscious, only 

indefinite moves toward and away from zero, which does not at all express 

lack but rather the positivity of the full body as support and prop ("for an 

afflux is necessary simply to signify the absence of intensity"). The wolves 

designate an intensity, a band of intensity, a threshold of intensity on the 

Wolf-Man's body without organs. A dentist told the Wolf-Man that he 

"would soon lose all his teeth because of the violence of his bite"—and that 

his gums were pocked with pustules and little holes.

4

 Jaw as high intensity,

 

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2 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

 

teeth as low intensity, and pustular gums as approach to zero. The wolf, as 

the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity in a given region, is not a 

representative, a substitute, but an I feel. I feel myself becoming a wolf, one 

wolf among others, on the edge of the pack. A cry of anguish, the only one 

Freud hears: Help me not become wolf (or the opposite, Help me not fail in 

this becoming). It is not a question of representation: don't think for a min-

ute that it has to do with believing oneself a wolf, representing oneself as a 

wolf. The wolf, wolves, are intensities, speeds, temperatures, 

nondecom-posable variable distances. A swarming, a wolfing. Who could 

ever believe that the anal machine bears no relation to the wolf machine, or 

that the two are only linked by an Oedipal apparatus, by the all-too-human 

figure of the Father? For in the end the anus also expresses an intensity, in 

this case the approach to zero of a distance that cannot be decomposed 

without its elements changing in nature. Afield of anuses, just like a pack of 
wolves. 
Does not the child, on the periphery, hold onto the wolves by his 

anus? The jaw descends to the anus. Hold onto those wolves by your jaw 

and your anus. The jaw is not a wolf jaw, it's not that simple; jaw and wolf 

form a multiplicity that is transformed into eye and wolf, anus and wolf, 

as a function of other distances, at other speeds, with other multiplicities, 

between thresholds. Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, 

becoming-wolf, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is 

what multiplicity is. To become wolf or to become hole is to 

deterritorialize oneself following distinct but entangled lines. A hole is no 

more negative than a wolf. Castration, lack, substitution: a tale told by an 

overconscious idiot who has no understanding of multiplicities as 

formations of the unconscious. A wolf is a hole, they are both particles of 

the unconscious, nothing but particles, productions of particles, particulate 

paths, as elements of molecular multiplicities. It is not even sufficient to 

say that intense and moving particles pass through holes; a hole is just as 

much a particle as what passes through it. Physicists say that holes are not 

the absence of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of 

light. Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration.

 

Let us return to the story of multiplicity, for the creation of this substan-

tive marks a very important moment. It was created precisely in order to 

escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one, to escape 

dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the pure state, to cease 

treating it as a numerical fragment of a lost Unity or Totality or as the 

organic element of a Unity or Totality yet to come, and instead distinguish 

between different types of multiplicity. Thus we find in the work of the 

mathematician and physicist Riemann a distinction between discreet mul-

tiplicities and continuous multiplicities (the metrical principle of the sec-

ond kind of multiplicity resides solely in forces at work within them). Then

 

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914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? D 33

 

in Meinong and Russell we find a distinction between multiplicities of 

magnitude or divisibility, which are extensive, and multiplicities of dis-

tance, which are closer to the intensive. And in Bergson there is a distinc-

tion between numerical or extended multiplicities and qualitative or 

durational multiplicities. We are doing approximately the same thing 

when we distinguish between arborescent multiplicities and rhizomatic 

multiplicities. Between macro- and micromultiplicities. On the one hand, 

multiplicities that are extensive, divisible, and molar; unifiable, 

total-izable, organizable; conscious or preconscious—and on the other 

hand, libidinal, unconscious, molecular, intensive multiplicities 

composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and 

distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that 

constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their 

communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before 

a certain threshold. The elements of this second kind of multiplicity are 

particles; their relations are distances; their movements are Brownian; 

their quantities are intensities, differences in intensity.

 

This only provides the logical foundation. Elias Canetti distinguishes 

between two types of multiplicity that are sometimes opposed but at other 

times interpenetrate: mass ("crowd") multiplicities and pack multiplici-

ties. Among the characteristics of a mass, in Canetti's sense, we should note 

large quantity, divisibility and equality of the members, concentration, 

sociability of the aggregate as a whole, one-way hierarchy, organization of 

territoriality or territorialization, and emission of signs. Among the char-

acteristics of a pack are small or restricted numbers, dispersion, 

nonde-composable variable distances, qualitative metamorphoses, 

inequalities as remainders or crossings, impossibility of a fixed 

totalization or hierar-chization, a Brownian variability in directions, lines 

of deterritorial-ization, and projection of particles.

5

 Doubtless, there is no 

more equality or any less hierarchy in packs than in masses, but they are 

of a different kind. The leader of the pack or the band plays move by 

move, must wager everything every hand, whereas the group or mass 

leader consolidates or capitalizes on past gains. The pack, even on its own 

turf, is constituted by a line of flight or of deterritorialization that is a 

component part of it, and to which it accredits a high positive value, 

whereas masses only integrate these lines in order to segment them, 

obstruct them, ascribe them a negative sign. Canetti notes that in a pack 

each member is alone even in the company of others (for example, 

wolves on the hunt); each takes care of himself at the same time as 

participating in the band. "In the changing constellation of the pack, in its 

dances and expeditions, he will again and again find himself at its edge. 

He may be in the center, and then, immediately afterwards, at the edge 

again; at the edge and then back in the center. When

 

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4 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

 

the pack forms a ring around the fire, each man will have neighbors to the 

right and left, but no one behind him; his back is naked and exposed to the 

wilderness."

6

 We recognize this as the schizo position, being on the periph-

ery, holding on by a hand or a foot. . .  As opposed to the paranoid position 

of the mass subject, with all the identifications of the individual with the 

group, the group with the leader, and the leader with the group; be securely 

embedded in the mass, get close to the center, never be at the edge except in 

the line of duty. Why assume (as does Konrad Lorenz, for example) that 

bands and their type of companionship represent a more rudimentary evo-

lutionary state than group societies or societies of conjugality? Not only do 

there exist bands of humans, but there are particularly refined examples: 

"high-society life" differs from "sociality" in that it is closer to the pack. 

Social persons have a certain envious and erroneous image of the 

high-society person because they are ignorant of high-society positions and 

hierarchies, the relations of force, the very particular ambitions and 

projects. High-society relations are never coextensive with social 

relations, they do not coincide. Even "mannerisms" (all bands have them) 

are specific to micromultiplicities and distinct from social manners or 

customs.

 

There is no question, however, of establishing a dualist opposition 

between the two types of multiplicities, molecular machines and molar 

machines', that would be no better than the dualism between the One and 

the multiple. There are only multiplicities of multiplicities forming a single 
assemblage, operating in the same assemblage: packs in masses and masses 

in packs. Trees have rhizome lines, and the rhizome points of 

arbor-escence. How could mad particles be produced with anything but a 

gigantic cyclotron? How could lines of deterritorialization be assignable 

outside of circuits of territoriality? Where else but in wide expanses, and 

in major upheavals in those expanses, could a tiny rivulet of new intensity 

suddenly start to flow? What do you not have to do in order to produce a 

new sound? Becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-inhuman, 

each involves a molar extension, a human hyperconcentration, or 

prepares the way for them. In Kafka, it is impossible to separate the 

erection of a great paranoid bureaucratic machine from the installation of 

little schizo machines of becoming-dog or becoming-beetle. In the case 

of the Wolf-Man, it is impossible to separate the becoming-wolf of his 

dream from the military and religious organization of his obsessions. A 

military man does a wolf; a military man does a dog. There are not two 

multiplicities or two machines; one and the same machinic assemblage 

produces and distributes the whole, in other words, the set of statements 

corresponding to the "complex." What does psychoanalysis have to say 

about all of this? Oedipus, nothing but Oedipus, because it hears nothing 

and listens to nobody. It flattens everything, masses and packs, molecular 

and molar machines,

 

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914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? □ 35

 

multiplicities of every variety. Take the Wolf-Man's second dream during 

his so-called psychotic episode: in the street, a wall with a closed door, to 

the left an empty dresser; in front of the dresser, the patient, and a big 

woman with a little scar who seems to want to skirt around the wall; behind 

the wall, wolves, rushing for the door. Even Brunswick can't go wrong: 

although she recognizes herself in the big woman, she does see that this 

time the wolves are Bolsheviks, the revolutionary mass that had emptied 

the dresser and confiscated the Wolf-Man's fortune. The wolves, in a 
metastable state, have gone over to a large-scale social machin
e But psycho-

analysis has nothing to say about all of these points—except what Freud 

already said: it all leads back to daddy (what do you know, he was one of the 

leaders of the liberal party in Russia, but that's hardly important; all that 

needs to be said is that the revolution "assuaged the patient's feelings of 

guilt"). You'd think that the investments and counterinvestments of the 

libido had nothing to do with mass disturbances, pack movements, collec-

tive signs, and particles of desire.

 

Thus it does not suffice to attribute molar multiplicities and mass 

machines to the preconscious, reserving another kind of machine or multi-

plicity for the unconscious. For it is the assemblage of both of these that is 

the province of the unconscious, the way in which the former condition the 

latter, and the latter prepare the way for the former, or elude them or return 

to them: the libido suffuses everything. Keep everything in sight at the 

same time—that a social machine or an organized mass has a molecular 

unconscious that marks not only its tendency to decompose but also the 

current components of its very operation and organization; that any indi-

vidual caught up in a mass has his/her own pack unconscious, which does 

not necessarily resemble the packs of the mass to which that individual 

belongs; that an individual or mass will live out in its unconscious the 

masses and packs of another mass or another individual. What does it 

mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract 

him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, 

whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to 

find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within 

himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join 

them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the 

other person's. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every 

love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be 

formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that some-

one can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires 

the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the 

multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. A 

pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a

 

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6 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

 

woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus's voice, a horde of wolves in somebody's 

throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the anus, mouth, or eye one is intent 

upon. We each go through so many bodies in each other. Albertine is slowly 

extracted from a group of girls with its own number, organization, code, 

and hierarchy; and not only is this group or restricted mass suffused by an 

unconscious, but Albertine has her own multiplicities that the narrator, 

once he has isolated her, discovers on her body and in her lies—until the 

end of their love returns her to the indiscernible.

 

Above all, it should not be thought that it suffices to distinguish the 

masses and exterior groups someone belongs to or participates in from the 

internal aggregates that person envelops in himself or herself. The 

distinction to be made is not at all between exterior and interior, which 

are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types 

of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places— 

machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in motion at a given 

moment, forming an assemblage productive of statements: "I love you" (or 

whatever). For Kafka, Felice is inseparable from a certain social machine, 

and, as a representative of the firm that manufactures them, from 

parlograph machines; how could she not belong to that organization in the 

eyes of Kafka, a man fascinated by commerce and bureaucracy? But at the 

same time, Felice's teeth, her big carnivorous teeth, send her racing down 

other lines, into the molecular multiplicities of a becoming-dog, a 

becoming-jackal . .. Felice is inseparable from the sign of the modern 

social machines belonging to her, from those belonging to Kafka (not the 

same ones), and from the particles, the little molecular machines, the 

whole strange becoming or journey Kafka will make and have her make 

through his perverse writing apparatus.

 

There are no individual statements, only statement-producing 

ma-chinic assemblages. We say that the assemblage is fundamentally 

libidinal and unconscious. It is the unconscious in person. For the moment, 

we will note that assemblages have elements (or multiplicities) of several 

kinds: human, social, and technical machines, organized molar machines; 

molecular machines with their particles of becoming-inhuman; Oedipal 

apparatuses (yes, of course there are Oedipal statements, many of them); 

and counter-Oedipal apparatuses, variable in aspect and functioning. We 

will go into it later. We can no longer even speak of distinct machines, 

only of types of interpenetrating multiplicities that at any given moment 

form a single machinic assemblage, the faceless figure of the libido. Each 

of us is caught up in an assemblage of this kind, and we reproduce its 

statements when we think we are speaking in our own name; or rather we 

speak in our own name when we produce its statement. And what bizarre 

statements they are; truly, the talk of lunatics. We mentioned Kafka, but 

we could just

 

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914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? □ 37

 

as well have said the Wolf-Man: a religious-military machine that Freud 

attributes to obsessional neurosis; an anal pack machine, an anal be-

coming-wolf or -wasp or -butterfly machine, which Freud attributes to the 

hysteric character; an Oedipal apparatus, which Freud considers the sole 

motor, the immobile motor that must be found everywhere; and a 

counter-Oedipal apparatus—incest with the sister, schizo-incest, or love 

with "people of inferior station"; and anality, homosexuality?—all that 

Freud sees only as Oedipal substitutes, regressions, and derivatives. In 

truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing. He has no idea what a 

libidinal assemblage is, with all the machineries it brings into play, all the 

multiple loves.

 

Of course, there are Oedipal statements. For example, Kafka's story, 

"Jackals and Arabs," is easy to read in that way: you can always do it, you 

can't lose, it works every time, even if you understand nothing. The Arabs 

are clearly associated with the father and the jackals with the mother; 

between the two, there is a whole story of castration represented by the 

rusty scissors. But it so happens that the Arabs are an extensive, armed, 

organized mass stretching across the entire desert; and the jackals are an 

intense pack forever launching into the desert following lines of flight or 

deterritorialization ("they are madmen, veritable madmen"); between the 

two, at the edge, the Man of the North, the jackal-man. And aren't those big 

scissors the Arab sign that guides or releases jackal-particles, both to accel-

erate their mad race by detaching them from the mass and to bring them 

back to the mass, to tame them and whip them, to bring them around? 

Dead camel: Oedipal food apparatus. Counter-Oedipal carrion apparatus: 

kill animals to eat, or eat to clean up carrion. The jackals formulate the 

problem well: it is not that of castration but of "cleanliness" (proprete, also 

"ownness"), the test of desert-desire. Which will prevail, mass territoriality 

or pack deterritorialization? The libido suffuses the entire desert, the body 

without organs on which the drama is played out.

 

There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is 

the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents 

of enunciation (take "collective agents" to mean not peoples or societies 

but multiplicities). The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an 

individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multi-

plicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation 

of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true proper name. 

The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity. The 

proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended as such in a 

field of intensity. What Proust said about the first name: when I said 

Gilberte's name, I had the impression that I was holding her entire body 

naked in my mouth. The Wolf-Man, a true proper name, an intimate first

 

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8 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

 

name linked to the becomings, infinitives, and intensities of a multiplied 

and depersonalized individual. What does psychoanalysis know about 

multiplication? The desert hour when the dromedary becomes a thousand 

dromedaries snickering in the sky. The evening hour when a thousand 

holes appear on the surface of the earth. Castration! Castration! cries the 

psychoanalytic scarecrow, who never saw more than a hole, a father or a 

dog where wolves are, a domesticated individual where there are wild mul-

tiplicities. We are not just criticizing psychoanalysis for having selected 

Oedipal statements exclusively. For such statements are to a certain extent 

part of a machinic assemblage, for which they could serve as correctional 

indexes, as in a calculation of errors. We are criticizing psychoanalysis for 

having used Oedipal enunciation to make patients believe they would pro-

duce individual, personal statements, and would finally speak in their own 

name. The trap was set from the start: never will the Wolf-Man speak. Talk 

as he might about wolves, howl as he might like a wolf, Freud does not even 

listen; he glances at his dog and answers, "It's daddy." For as long as that 

lasts, Freud calls it neurosis; when it cracks, it's psychosis. The Wolf-Man 

will receive the psychoanalytic medal of honor for services rendered to the 

cause, and even disabled veterans' benefits. He could have spoken in his 

own name only if the machinic assemblage that was producing particular 

statements in him had been brought to light. But there is no question of that 

in psychoanalysis: at the very moment the subject is persuaded that he or 

she will be uttering the most individual of statements, he or she is deprived 

of all basis for enunciation. Silence people, prevent them from speaking, 

and above all, when they do speak, pretend they haven't said a thing: the 

famous psychoanalytic neutrality. The Wolf-Man keeps howling: Six 

wolves! Seven wolves! Freud says, How's that? Goats, you say? How inter-

esting. Take away the goats and all you have left is a wolf, so it's your 

father ... That is why the Wolf-Man feels so fatigued: he's left lying there 

with all his wolves in his throat, all those little holes on his nose, and all 

those libidi-nal values on his body without organs. The war will come, the 

wolves will become Bolsheviks, and the Wolf-Man will remain suffocated 

by all he had to say. All we will be told is that he became well behaved, 

polite, and resigned again, "honest and scrupulous." In short, cured. He 

gets back by pointing out that psychoanalysis lacks a truly zoological 

vision: "Nothing can be more valuable for a young person than the love of 

nature and a comprehension of the natural sciences, in particular 

zoology."

7

 

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3. 10,000 

B

.

C

:

 

The Geology of Morals 

(Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)

 

 

 

Double Articulation

 

39

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4

0 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

The same Professor Challenger who made the Earth scream with his pain 

machine, as described by Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a lecture after mixing 

several textbooks on geology and biology in a fashion befitting his simian 

disposition. He explained that the Earth—the Deterritorialized, the 

Glacial, the giant Molecule—is a body without organs. This body without 

organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all direc-

tions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory par-

ticles. That, however, was not the question at hand. For there simultane-

ously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable phenomenon that 

is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratifica-

tion. Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist of giving form to matters, of 

imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance 

and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large 

and small and organizing them into molar aggregates. Strata are acts of 

capture, they are like "black holes" or occlusions striving to seize whatever 

comes within their reach.

1

 They operate by coding and territorialization 

upon the earth; they proceed simultaneously by code and by territoriality. 

The strata are judgments of God; stratification in general is the entire sys-

tem of the judgment of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, con-

stantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, 

deterritorialized).

 

Challenger quoted a sentence he said he came across in a geology text-

book. He said we needed to learn it by heart because we would only be in a 

position to understand it later on: "A surface of stratification is a more 

compact plane of consistency lying between two layers." The layers are the 

strata. They come at least in pairs, one serving as substratum for the other. 

The surface of stratification is a machinic assemblage distinct from the 

strata. The assemblage is between two layers, between two strata; on one 

side it faces the strata (in this direction, the assemblage is an interstratum), 

but the other side faces something else, the body without organs or plane of 

consistency (here, it is a metastratum). In effect, the body without organs is 

itself the plane of consistency, which becomes compact or thickens at the 

level of the strata.

 

God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata 

come at least in pairs, but in a different way each stratum is double (it itself 

has several layers). Each stratum exhibits phenomena constitutive of dou-
ble articulation. 
Articulate twice, B-A, BA. This is not at all to say that the 

strata speak or are language based. Double articulation is so extremely var-

iable that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple 

case. The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable 

particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units 
{substances)  upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and 

successions (forms).

 

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0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 41

 

The second articulation establishes functional, compact, stable structures 
(forms), and constructs the molar compounds in which these structures are 

simultaneously actualized {substances). In a geological stratum, for exam-

ple, the first articulation is the process of "sedimentation," which deposits 

units of cyclic sediment according to a statistical order: flysch, with its 

succession of sandstone and schist. The second articulation is the "fold-

ing" that sets up a stable functional structure and effects the passage from 

sediment to sedimentary rock.

 

It is clear that the distinction between the two articulations is not 

between substances and forms. Substances are nothing other than formed 

matters. Forms imply a code, modes of coding and decoding. Substances as 

formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of territorialization and 

deterritorialization. But each articulation has a code and a territoriality; 

therefore each possesses both form and substance. For now, all we can say is 

that each articulation has a corresponding type of segmentarity or multi-

plicity: one type is supple, more molecular, and merely ordered; the other is 

more rigid, molar, and organized. Although the first articulation is not 

lacking in systematic interactions, it is in the second articulation in partic-

ular that phenomena constituting an overcoding are produced, phenom-

ena of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization, 

and finalization. Both articulations establish binary relations between 

their respective segments. But between the segments of one articulation 

and the segments of the other there are biunivocal relationships obeying far 

more complex laws. The word "structure" may be used to designate the 

sum of these relations and relationships, but it is an illusion to believe that 

structure is the earth's last word. Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted 

that the distinction between the two articulations is always that of the 

molecular and the molar.

 

He skipped over the immense diversity of the energetic, 

physico-chemical, and geological strata. He went straight to the organic 

strata, or the existence of a great organic stratification. The problem of 

the organism—how to "make" the body an organism—is once again a 

problem of articulation, of the articulatory relation. The Dogons, well 

known to the professor, formulate the problem as follows: an organism 

befalls the body of the smith, by virtue of a machine or machinic 

assemblage that stratifies it. "The shock of the hammer and the anvil 

broke his arms and legs at the elbows and knees, which until that 

moment he had not possessed. In this way, he received the articulations 

specific to the new human form that was to spread across the earth, a form 

dedicated to work.... His arm became folded with a view to work."

2

 It is 

obviously only a manner of speaking to limit the articulatory relation to 

the bones. The entire organism must be considered in relation to a 

double articulation, and on different levels.

 

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2 D 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

First, on the level of morphogenesis: on the one hand, realities of the 

molecular type with aleatory relations are caught up in crowd phenomena 

or statistical aggregates determining an order (the protein fiber and its 

sequence or segmentarity); on the other hand, these aggregates themselves 

are taken up into stable structures that "elect" stereoscopic compounds, 

form organs, functions, and regulations, organize molar mechanisms, and 

even distribute centers capable of overflying crowds, overseeing mecha-

nisms, utilizing and repairing tools, "overcoding" the aggregate (the fold-

ing back on itself of the fiber to form a compact structure; a second kind of 

segmentarity).

3

 Sedimentation and folding, fiber and infolding.

 

On a different level, the cellular chemistry presiding over the constitu-

tion of proteins also operates by double articulation. This double articula-

tion is internal to the molecular, it is the articulation between small and 

large molecules, a segmentarity by successive modifications and polymeri-

zation. "First, the elements taken from the medium are combined through 

a series of transformations.. . .All this activity involves hundreds of chem-

ical reactions. But ultimately, it produces a limited number of small com-

pounds, a few dozen at most. In the second stage of cellular chemistry, the 

small molecules are assembled to produce larger ones. It is the polymeriza-

tion of units linked end-to-end that forms the characteristic chains of 

mac-romolecules. . .. The two stages of cellular chemistry, therefore, 

differ in their function, products and nature. The first carves out chemical 

motifs; the second assembles them. The first forms compounds that exist 

only temporarily, for they are intermediaries on the path of biosynthesis; 

the second constructs stable products. The first operates by a series of 

different reactions; the second by repeating the same reaction."

4

 There is, 

moreover, a third level, upon which cellular chemistry itself depends. It is 

the genetic code, which is in turn inseparable from a double segmentarity 

or a double articulation, this time between two types of independent 

molecules: the sequence of protein units and the sequence of nucleic 

units, with binary relations between units of the same type and 

biunivocal relationships between units of different types. Thus there are 

always two articulations, two segmentarities, two kinds of multiplicity, 

each of which brings into play both forms and substances. But the 

distribution of these two articulations is not constant, even within the 

same stratum.

 

The audience rather sulkily denounced the numerous misunderstand-

ings, misinterpretations, and even misappropriations in the professor's 

presentation, despite the authorities he had appealed to, calling them his 

"friends." Even the Dogons . . . And things would presently get worse. The 

professor cynically congratulated himself on taking his pleasure from 

behind, but the offspring always turned out to be runts and wens, bits and 

pieces, if not stupid vulgarizations. Besides, the professor was not a geolo-

 

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0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 43

 

gist or a biologist, he was not even a linguist, ethnologist, or psychoanalyst; 

what his specialty had been was long since forgotten. In fact, Professor 

Challenger was double, articulated twice, and that did not make things any 

easier, people never knew which of him was present. He (?) claimed to have 

invented a discipline he referred to by various names: rhizomatics, 

stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the 

science of multiplicities. Yet no one clearly understood what the goals, 

method, or principles of this discipline were. Young Professor Alasca, 

Challenger's pet student, tried hypocritically to defend him by explaining 

that on a given stratum the passage from one articulation to the other was 

easily verified because it was always accompanied by a loss of water, in 

genetics as in geology, and even in linguistics, where the importance of the 

"lost saliva" phenomenon is measured. Challenger took offense, preferring 

to cite his friend, as he called him, the Danish Spinozist geologist, 

Hjelmslev, that dark prince descended from Hamlet who also made lan-

guage his concern, precisely in order to analyze its "stratification." 

Hjelmslev was able to weave a net out of the notions of matter, content and 
expression,form and substance. These were the strata, said Hjelmslev. Now 

this net had the advantage of breaking with the form-content duality, since 

there was a form of content no less than a form of expression. Hjelmslev's 

enemies saw this merely as a way of rebaptizing the discredited notions of 

the signified and signifier, but something quite different was actually going 

on. Despite what Hjelmslev himself may have said, the net is not linguistic 

in scope or origin (the same must be said of double articulation: if language 

has a specificity of its own, as it most certainly does, that specificity con-

sists neither in double articulation nor in Hjelmslev's net, which are gen-

eral characteristics of strata).

 

He used the term matter for the plane of consistency or Body without 

Organs, in other words, the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or 

destratified body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, 

pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities. He used the 

term content for formed matters, which would now have to be considered 

from two points of view: substance, insofar as these matters are "chosen," 

and form, insofar as they are chosen in a certain order {substance and form 
of content). 
He used the term expression for functional structures, which 

would also have to be considered from two points of view: the organization 

of their own specific form, and substances insofar as they form compounds 
(form and content of expression). A stratum always has a dimension of the 

expressible or of expression serving as the basis for a relative invariance; 

for example, nucleic sequences are inseparable from a relatively invariant 

expression by means of which they determine the compounds, organs, and 

functions of the organism.

5

 To express is always to sing the glory of God.

 

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4 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

Every stratum is a judgment of God; not only do plants and animals, 

orchids and wasps, sing or express themselves, but so do rocks and even riv-

ers, every stratified thing on earth. The first articulation concerns content, 
the second expression. 
The distinction between the two articulations is not 

between forms and substances but between content and expression, 

expression having just as much substance as content and content just as 

much form as expression. The double articulation sometimes coincides 

with the molecular and the molar, and sometimes not; this is because con-

tent and expression are sometimes divided along those lines and some-

times along different lines. There is never correspondence or conformity 

between content and expression, only isomorphism with reciprocal pre-

supposition. The distinction between content and expression is always 
real, 
in various ways, but it cannot be said that the terms preexist their dou-

ble articulation. It is the double articulation that distributes them accord-

ing to the line it draws in each stratum; it is what constitutes their real 

distinction. (On the other hand, there is no real distinction between form 

and substance, only a mental or modal distinction: since substances are 

nothing other than formed matters, formless substances are inconceivable, 

although it is possible in certain instances to conceive of substanceless 

forms.)

 

Even though there is a real distinction between them, content and 

expression are relative terms ("first" and "second" articulation should also 

be understood in an entirely relative fashion). Even though it is capable of 

invariance, expression is just as much a variable as content. Content and 

expression are two variables of a function of stratification. They not only 

vary from one stratum to another, but intermingle, and within the same 

stratum multiply and divide ad infinitum. Since every articulation is dou-

ble, there is not an articulation of content and  an articulation of 

expression—the articulation of content is double in its own right and con-

stitutes a relative expression within content; the articulation of expression 

is also double and constitutes a relative content within expression. For this 

reason, there exist intermediate states between content and expression, 

expression and content: the levels, equilibriums, and exchanges through 

which a stratified system passes. In short, we find forms and substances of 

content that play the role of expression in relation to other forms and sub-

stances, and conversely for expression. These new distinctions do not, 

therefore, coincide with the distinction between forms and substances 

within each articulation; instead, they show that each articulation is 

already, or still, double. This can be seen on the organic stratum: proteins 

of content have two forms, one of which (the infolded fiber) plays the role 

of functional expression in relation to the other. The same goes for the 

nucleic acids of expression: double articulations cause certain formal and

 

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10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 45

 

substantial elements to play the role of content in relation to others; not 

only does the half of the chain that is reproduced become a content, but the 

reconstituted chain itself becomes a content in relation to the "messenger." 

There are double pincers everywhere on a stratum; everywhere and in all 

directions there are double binds and lobsters, a multiplicity of double 

articulations affecting both expression and content. Through all of this, 

Hjelmslev's warning should not be forgotten: "The terms expression plane 

and content plane ... are chosen in conformity with established notions 

and are quite arbitrary. Their functional definition provides no justifica-

tion for calling one, and not the other, of these entities expression, or one, 

and not the other, content. They are defined only by their mutual solidarity, 

and neither of them can be identified otherwise. They are defined only 

oppositively and relatively, as mutually opposed functives of one and the 

same function."

6

 We must combine all the resources of real distinction, 

reciprocal presupposition, and general relativism.

 

The question we must ask is what on a given stratum varies and what 

does not. What accounts for the unity and diversity of a stratum? Matter, 

the pure matter of the plane of consistency (or inconsistency) lies outside 

the strata. The molecular materials borrowed from the substrata may be 

the same throughout a stratum, but that does not mean that the molecules 

will be the same. The substantial elements may be the same throughout the 

stratum without the substances being the same. The formal relations or 

bonds may be the same without the forms being the same. In biochemistry, 

there is a unity of composition of the organic stratum defined at the level of 

materials and energy, substantial elements or radicals, bonds and reac-

tions. But there is a variety of different molecules, substances, and forms.

 

Should we not sing the praise of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire? For in the nine-

teenth century he developed a grandiose conception of stratification. He 

said that matter, considered from the standpoint of its greatest divisibility, 

consists in particles of decreasing size, flows or elastic fluids that "deploy 

themselves" by radiating through space. Combustion is the process of this 

escape or infinite division on the plane of consistency. Electrification is the 

opposite process, constitutive of strata; it is the process whereby similar 

particles group together to form atoms and molecules, similar molecules to 

form bigger molecules, and the biggest molecules to form molar aggregates: 

"the attraction of like by like," as in a double pincer or double articulation. 

Thus there is no vital matter specific to the organic stratum, matter is the 

same on all the strata. But the organic stratum does have a specific unity of 

composition, a single abstract Animal, a single machine embedded in the 

stratum, and presents everywhere the same molecular materials, the same 

elements or anatomical components of organs, the same formal connec-

 

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6 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

tions. Organic forms are nevertheless different from one another, as are 

organs, compound substances, and molecules. It is of little or no impor-

tance that Geoffroy chose anatomical elements as the substantial units 

rather than protein and nucleic acid radicals. At any rate, he already 

invoked a whole interplay of molecules. The important thing is the princi-

ple of the simultaneous unity and variety of the stratum: isomorphism of 

forms but no correspondence; identity of elements or components but no 

identity of compound substances.

 

This is where the dialogue, or rather violent debate, with Cuvier came 

in. To keep the last of the audience from leaving, Challenger imagined a 

particularly epistemological dialogue of the dead, in puppet theater style. 

Geoffroy called forth Monsters, Cuvier laid out all the Fossils in order, 

Baer flourished flasks filled with embryos, Vialleton put on a tetrapod's 

belt, Perrier mimed the dramatic battle between the Mouth and the Brain, 

and so on. Geoffroy: The proof that there is isomorphism is that you can 

always get from one form on the organic stratum to another, however dif-

ferent they may be, by means of "folding." To go from the Vertebrate to the 

Cephalopod, bring the two sides of the Vertebrate's backbone together, 

bend its head down to its feet and its pelvis up to the nape of its neck ... 
Cuvier  (angrily): That's just not true! You go from an Elephant to a 

Medusa; I know, I tried. There are irreducible axes, types, branches. There 

are resemblances between organs and analogies between forms, nothing 

more. You're a falsifier, a metaphysician. Vialleton (a disciple of Cuvier 

and Baer): Even if folding gave good results, who could endure it? It's not 

by chance that Geoffroy only considers anatomical elements. No muscle or 

ligament would survive it. Geoffroy. I said that there was isomorphism but 

not correspondence. You have to bring "degrees of development or perfec-

tion" into the picture. It is not everywhere on a stratum that materials 

reach the degree at which they form a given aggregate. Anatomical ele-

ments may be arrested or inhibited in certain places by molecular clashes, 

the influence of the milieu, or pressure from neighbors to such an extent 

that they compose different organs. The same formal relations or connec-

tions are then effectuated in entirely different forms and arrangements. It 

is still the same abstract Animal that is realized throughout the stratum, 

only to varying degrees, in varying modes. Each time, it is as perfect as its 

surroundings or milieu allows it to be (it is obviously not yet a question of 

evolution: neither folding nor degrees imply descent or derivation, only 

autonomous realizations of the same abstract relations). This is where 

Geoffroy invoked Monsters: human monsters are embryos that were 

retarded at a certain degree of development, the human in them is only a 

straitjacket for inhuman forms and substances. Yes, the Heteradelph is a 

crustacean. Baer (an ally of Cuvier and contemporary of Darwin, about

 

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0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 47

 

whom he had reservations, in addition to being an enemy of Geoffroy): 

That's not true, you can't confuse degrees of development with types of 

forms. A single type has several degrees, a single degree is found in several 

types, but never will you make types out of degrees. An embryo of one type 

cannot display another type; at most, it can be of the same degree as an 

embryo of the second type. Vialleton (a disciple of Baer's who took both 

Darwin and Geoffroy one further): And then there are things that only an 

embryo can do or endure. It can do or endure these things precisely because 

of its type, not because it can go from one type to another according to 

degrees of development. Admire the Tortoise. Its neck requires that a cer-

tain number of protovertebrae change position, and its front limbs must 

slide 180 degrees in relation to that of a bird. You can never draw conclu-

sions about phylogenesis on the basis of embryogenesis. Folding does not 

make it possible to go from one type to another; quite the contrary, the 

types testify to the irreducibility of the forms of folding ... (Thus Vialleton 

presented two kinds of interconnected arguments in the service of the same 

cause, saying first that there are things no animal can do by reason of its 

substance, and then that there are things that only an embryo can do by rea-

son of its form. Two strong arguments.)

7

 

We're a little lost now. There is so much going on in these retorts. So 

many endlessly proliferating distinctions. So much getting even, for 

episte-mology is not innocent. The sweet and subtle Geoffroy and the 

violent and serious Cuvier do battle around Napoleon. Cuvier, the rigid 

specialist, is pitted against Geoffroy, always ready to switch specialities. 

Cuvier hates Geoffroy, he can't stomach Geoffroy's lighthearted 

formulas, his humor (yes, Hens do indeed have teeth, the Lobster has 

skin on its bones, etc.). Cuvier is a man of Power and Terrain, and he 

won't let Geoffroy forget it; Geoffroy, on the other hand, prefigures the 

nomadic man of speed. Cuvier reflects a Euclidean space, whereas 

Geoffroy thinks topologically. Today let us invoke the folds of the cortex 

with all their paradoxes. Strata are topological, and Geoffroy is a great 

artist of the fold, a formidable artist; as such, he already has a 

presentiment of a certain kind of animal rhizome with aberrant paths of 

communication—Monsters. Cuvier reacts in terms of discontinuous 

photographs, and casts of fossils. But we're a little lost, because 

distinctions have proliferated in all directions.

 

We have not even taken Darwin, evolutionism, or neoevolutionism into 

account yet. This, however, is where a decisive phenomenon occurs: our 

puppet theater becomes more and more nebulous, in other words, collec-

tive and differential. Earlier, we invoked two factors, and their uncertain 

relations, in order to explain the diversity within a stratum—degrees of 

development or perfection and types of forms. They now undergo a pro-

found transformation. There is a double tendency for types of forms to be

 

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8 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

understood increasingly in terms of populations, packs and colonies, 

collectivities or multiplicities; and degrees of development in terms of 

speeds, rates, coefficients, and differential relations. A double deepening. 

This, Darwinism's fundamental contribution, implies a new coupling of 

individuals and milieus on the stratum.

8

 

First, if we assume the presence of an elementary or even molecular pop-

ulation in a given milieu, the forms do not preexist the population, they are 

more like statistical results. The more a population assumes divergent 

forms, the more its multiplicity divides into multiplicities of different 

nature, the more its elements form distinct compounds or matters—the 

more efficiently it distributes itself in the milieu, or divides up the milieu. 

Thus the relationship between embryogenesis and phylogenesis is 

reversed: the embryo does not testify to an absolute form preestablished in 

a closed milieu; rather, the phylogenesis of populations has at its disposal, 

in an open milieu, an entire range of relative forms to choose from, none of 

which is preestablished. In embryogenesis, "It is possible to tell from the 

parents, anticipating the outcome of the process, whether a pigeon or a wolf 

is developing.... But here the points of reference themselves are in 

motion: there are only fixed points for convenience of expression. At the 

level of universal evolution, it is impossible to discern that kind of refer-

ence point.... Life on earth appears as a sum of relatively independent 

species of flora and fauna with sometimes shifting or porous boundaries 

between them. Geographical areas can only harbor a sort of chaos, or, at 

best, extrinsic harmonies of an ecological order, temporary equilibriums 

between populations."

9

 

Second, simultaneously and under the same conditions, the degrees are 

not degrees of preexistent development or perfection but are instead global 

and relative equilibriums: they enter into play as a function of the advan-

tage they give particular elements, then a particular multiplicity in the 

milieu, and as a function of a particular variation in the milieu. Degrees are 

no longer measured in terms of increasing perfection or a differentiation 

and increase in the complexity of the parts, but in terms of differential rela-

tions and coefficients such as selective pressure, catalytic action, speed of 

propagation, rate of growth, evolution, mutation, etc. Relative progress, 

then, can occur by formal and quantitative simplification rather than by 

complication, by a loss of components and syntheses rather than by acqui-

sition (it is a question of speed, and speed is a differential). It is through 

populations that one is formed, assumes forms, and through loss that one 

progresses and picks up speed. Darwinism's two fundamental contribu-

tions move in the direction of a science of multiplicities: the substitution of 

populations for types, and the substitution of rates or differential relations 

for degrees.

10

 These are nomadic contributions with shifting boundaries

 

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determined by populations or variations of multiplicities, and with differ-

ential coefficients or variations of relations. Contemporary biochemistry, 

or "molecular Darwinism" as Monod calls it, confirms, on the level of a 

single statistical and global individual, or a simple sample, the decisive 

importance of molecular populations and microbiological rates (for exam-

ple, the endlessness of the sequence composing a chain, and the chance var-

iation of a single segment in the sequence).

 

Challenger admitted having digressed at length but added that there was 

no possible way to distinguish between the digressive and the 

nondi-gressive. The point was to arrive at several conclusions 

concerning the unity and diversity of a single stratum, in this case the 

organic stratum.

 

To begin with, a stratum does indeed have a unity of composition, which 

is what allows it to be called stratum: molecular materials, substantial ele-

ments, and formal relations or traits. Materials are not the same as the 

unformed matter of the plane of consistency; they are already stratified, 

and come from "substrata." But of course substrata should not be thought 

of only as substrata: in particular, their organization is no less complex 

than, nor is it inferior to, that of the strata; we should be on our guard 

against any kind of ridiculous cosmic evolutionism. The materials fur-

nished by a substratum are no doubt simpler than the compounds of a stra-

tum, but their level of organization in the substratum is no lower than that 

of the stratum itself. The difference between materials and substantial ele-

ments is one of organization; there is a change in organization, not an aug-

mentation. The materials furnished by the substratum constitute an 
exterior milieu for the elements and compounds of the stratum under con-

sideration, but they are not exterior to the stratum. The elements and com-

pounds constitute an interior of the stratum, just as the materials 

constitute an exterior of the stratum; both belong to the stratum, the latter 

because they are materials that have been furnished to the stratum and 

selected for it, the former because they are formed from the materials. 

Once again, this exterior and interior are relative; they exist only through 

their exchanges and therefore only by virtue of the stratum responsible for 

the relation between them. For example, on a crystalline stratum, the 

amorphous milieu, or medium, is exterior to the seed before the crystal has 

formed; the crystal forms by interiorizing and incorporating masses of 

amorphous material. Conversely, the interiority of the seed of the crystal 

must move out to the system's exterior, where the amorphous medium can 

crystallize (the aptitude to switch over to the other form of organization). 

To the point that the seed itself comes from the outside. In short, both exte-

rior and interior are interior to the stratum. The same applies to the organic 

stratum: the materials furnished by the substrata are an exterior medium 

constituting the famous prebiotic soup, and catalysts play the role of seed

 

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in the formation of interior substantial elements or even compounds. 

These elements and compounds both appropriate materials and exteri-

orize themselves through replication, even in the conditions of the primor-

dial soup itself. Once again, interior and exterior exchange places, and both 

are interior to the organic stratum. The limit between them is the mem-

brane that regulates the exchanges and transformation in organization (in 

other words, the distributions interior to the stratum) and that defines all 

of the stratum's formal relations or traits (even though the situation and 

role of the limit vary widely depending on the stratum, for example, the 

limit of the crystal as compared to the cellular membrane). We may there-

fore use the term central layer, or central ring, for the following aggregate 

comprising the unity of composition of a stratum: exterior molecular 

materials, interior substantial elements, and the limit or membrane con-

veying the formal relations. There is a single abstract machine that is envel-

oped by the stratum and constitutes its unity. This is the Ecumenon, as 

opposed to the Planomenon of the plane of consistency.

 

It would be a mistake to believe that it is possible to isolate this unitary, 

central layer of the stratum, or to grasp it in itself, by regression. In the first 

place, a stratum necessarily goes from layer to layer, and from the very 

beginning. It already has several layers. It goes from a center to a periphery, 

at the same time as the periphery reacts back upon the center to form a new 

center in relation to a new periphery. Flows constantly radiate outward, 

then turn back. There is an outgrowth and multiplication of intermediate 

states, and this process is one of the local conditions of the central ring 

(different concentrations, variations that are tolerated below a certain 

threshold of identity). These intermediate states present new figures of 

milieus or materials, as well as of elements and compounds. They are inter-

mediaries between the exterior milieu and the interior element, substantial 

elements and their compounds, compounds and substances, and between 

the different formed substances (substances of content and substances of 

expression). We will use the term epistrata for these intermediaries and 

superpositions, these outgrowths, these levels. Returning to our two exam-

ples, on the crystalline stratum there are many intermediaries between the 

exterior milieu or material and the interior seed: a multiplicity of perfectly 

discontinuous states of metastability constituting so many hierarchical 

degrees. Neither is the organic stratum separable from so-called interior 

milieus that are interior elements in relation to exterior materials but also 

exterior elements in relation to interior substances." These internal 

organic milieus are known to regulate the degree of complexity or differen-

tiation of the parts of an organism. A stratum, considered from the stand-

point of its unity of composition, therefore exists only in its substantial 

epistrata, which shatter its continuity, fragment its ring, and break it down

 

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into gradations. The central ring does not exist independently of a periph-

ery that forms a new center, reacts back upon the first center, and in turn 

gives forth discontinuous epistrata.

 

That is not all. In addition to this new or second-degree relativity of inte-

rior and exterior, there is a whole history on the level of the membrane or 

limit. To the extent that elements and compounds incorporate or appropri-

ate materials, the corresponding organisms are forced to turn to other 

"more foreign and less convenient" materials that they take from still 

intact masses or other organisms. The milieu assumes a third figure here: it 

is no longer an interior or exterior milieu, even a relative one, nor an inter-

mediate milieu, but instead an annexed or associated milieu. Associated 

milieus imply sources of energy different from alimentary materials. 

Before these sources are obtained, the organism can be said to nourish 

itself but not to breathe: it is in a state of suffocation.

n

 Obtaining an energy 

source permits an increase in the number of materials that can be trans-

formed into elements and compounds. The associated milieu is thus 

defined by the capture of energy sources (respiration in the most general 

sense), by the discernment of materials, the sensing of their presence or 

absence (perception), and by the fabrication or nonfabrication of the corre-

sponding compounds (response, reaction). That there are molecular per-

ceptions no less than molecular reactions can be seen in the economy of the 

cell and the property of regulatory agents to "recognize" only one or two 

kinds of chemicals in a very diverse milieu of exteriority. The development 

of the associated milieus culminates in the animal worlds described by von 

Uexkull, with all their active, perceptive, and energetic characteristics. 

The unforgettable associated world of the Tick, defined by its gravitational 

energy of falling, its olfactory characteristic of perceiving sweat, and its 

active characteristic of latching on: the tick climbs a branch and drops onto 

a passing mammal it has recognized by smell, then latches onto its skin (an 

associated world composed of three factors, and no more). Active and per-

ceptive characteristics are themselves something of a double pincer, a dou-

ble articulation.

13

 

Here, the associated milieus are closely related to organic forms. An 

organic form is not a simple structure but a structuration, the constitution 

of an associated milieu. An animal milieu, such as the spider web, is no less 

"morphogenetic" than the form of the organism. One certainly cannot say 

that the milieu determines the form; but to complicate things, this does not 

make the relation between form and milieu any less decisive. Since the 

form depends on an autonomous code, it can only be constituted in an 

associated milieu that interlaces active, perceptive, and energetic charac-

teristics in a complex fashion, in conformity with the code's requirements; 

and the form can develop only through intermediary milieus that regulate

 

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the speeds and rates of its substances; and it can experience itself only in a 

milieu of exteriority that measures the comparative advantages of the asso-

ciated milieus and the differential relations of the intermediary milieus. 

Milieus always act, through selection, on entire organisms, the forms of 

which depend on codes those milieus sanction indirectly. Associated 

milieus divide a single milieu of exteriority among themselves as a func-

tion of different forms, just as intermediate milieus divide a milieu of 

exteriority among themselves as a function of the rates or degrees of a sin-

gle form. But the dividing is done differently in the two cases. In relation to 

the central belt of the stratum, the intermediate strata or milieus constitute 

"epistrata" piled one atop the other, and form new centers for the new 

peripheries. We will apply the term "parastrata" to the second way in which 

the central belt fragments into sides and "besides," and the irreducible 

forms and milieus associated with them. This time, it is at the level of the 

limit or membrane of the central belt that the formal relations or traits 

common to all of the strata necessarily assume entirely different forms or 

types of forms corresponding to the parastrata. A stratum exists only in its 

epistrata and parastrata, so that in the final analysis these must be consid-

ered strata in their own right. The ideally continuous belt or ring of the 

stratum—the Ecumenon defined by the identity of molecular materials, 

substantial elements, and formal relations—exists only as shattered, frag-

mented into epistrata and parastrata that imply concrete machines and 

their respective indexes, and constitute different molecules, specific sub-

stances, and irreducible forms.

14

 

We may now return to the two fundamental contributions of Darwinism 

and answer the question of why forms or types of forms in the parastrata 

must be understood in relation to populations, and degrees of develop-

ment in the epistrata as rates or differential relations. First, parastrata 

envelop the very codes upon which the forms depend, and these codes nec-

essarily apply to populations. There must already be an entire molecular 

population to be coded, and the effects of the code, or a change in the code, 

are evaluated in relation to a more or less molar population, depending on 

the code's ability to propagate in the milieu or create for itself a new associ-

ated milieu within which the modification will be popularizable. Yes, we 

must always think in terms of packs and multiplicities: a code does or does 

not take hold because the coded individual belongs to a certain population, 

"the population inhabiting test tubes, a flask full of water, or a mammal's 

intestine." What does it mean to say that new forms and associated milieus 

potentially result from a change in the code, a modification of the code, or a 

variation in the parastratum? The change is obviously not due to a passage 

from one preestablished form to another, in other words, a translation 

from one code to another. As long as the problem was formulated in that

 

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10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 53

 

fashion, it remained insoluble, and one would have to agree with Cuvier 

and Baer that established types of forms are irreducible and therefore do 

not admit of translation or transformation. But as soon as it is recognized 

that a code is inseparable from a process of decoding that is inherent to it, 

the problem receives a new formulation. There is no genetics without 

"genetic drift." The modern theory of mutations has clearly demonstrated 

that a code, which necessarily relates to a population, has an essential mar-

gin of decoding: not only does every code have supplements capable of free 

variation, but a single segment may be copied twice, the second copy left 

free for variation. In addition, fragments of code may be transferred from 

the cells of one species to those of another, Man and Mouse, Monkey and 

Cat, by viruses or through other procedures. This involves not translation 

between codes (viruses are not translators) but a singular phenomenon we 

call surplus value of code, or side-communication.'

5

 We will have occasion 

to discuss this further, for it is essential to all becomings-animal. Every 

code is affected by a margin of decoding due to these supplements and sur-

plus values—supplements in the order of a multiplicity, surplus values in 

the order of a rhizome. Forms in the parastrata, the parastrata themselves, 

far from lying immobile and frozen upon the strata, are part of a machinic 

interlock: they relate to populations, populations imply codes, and codes 

fundamentally include phenomena of relative decoding that are all the 

more usable, composable, and addable by virtue of being relative, always 

"beside."

 

Forms relate to codes and processes of coding and decoding in the 

parastrata; substances, being formed matters, relate to territorialities and 

movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization on the 

epis-trata. In truth, the epistrata are just as inseparable from the 

movements that constitute them as the parastrata are from their 

processes. Nomadic waves or flows of deterritorialization go from the 

central layer to the periphery, then from the new center to the new 

periphery, falling back to the old center and launching forth to the new.

16

 

The organization of the epistrata moves in the direction of increasing 

deterritorialization. Physical particles and chemical substances cross 

thresholds of deterritorialization on their own stratum and between strata; 

these thresholds correspond to more or less stable intermediate states, to 

more or less transitory valences and existences, to engagements with this 

or that other body, to densities of proximity, to more or less localizable 

connections. Not only are physical particles characterized by speeds of 

deterritorialization—Joycean tachyons, particles-holes, and quarks 

recalling the fundamental idea of the "soup"—but a single chemical 

substance (sulfur or carbon, for example) has a number of more and less 

deterritorialized states. The more interior milieus an organism has on its 

own stratum, assuring its autonomy and

 

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THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the exterior, the more 

deterritorialized it is. That is why degrees of development must be under-

stood relatively, and as a function of differential speeds, relations, and 

rates. Deterritorialization must be thought of as a perfectly positive power 

that has degrees and thresholds (epistrata), is always relative, and has 

reterritorialization as its flipside or complement. An organism that is 

deterritorialized in relation to the exterior necessarily reterritorializes on 

its interior milieus. A given presumed fragment of embryo is deterrito-

rialized when it changes thresholds or gradients, but is assigned a new role 

by the new surroundings. Local movements are alterations. Cellular migra-

tion, stretching, invagination, folding are examples of this. Every voyage is 

intensive, and occurs in relation to thresholds of intensity between which it 

evolves or that it crosses. One travels by intensity; displacements and 

spatial figures depend on intensive thresholds of nomadic deterritoriali-

zation (and thus on differential relations) that simultaneously define com-

plementary, sedentary reterritorializations. Every stratum operates this 

way: by grasping in its pincers a maximum number of intensities or inten-

sive particles over which it spreads its forms and substances, constituting 

determinate gradients and thresholds of resonance (deterritorialization on 

a stratum always occurs in relation to a complementary reterrito-

rialization).

17

 

As long as preestablished forms were compared to predetermined 

degrees, all one could do was affirm their irreducibility, and there was no 

way of judging possible communication between the two factors. But we 

see now that forms depend on codes in the parastrata and plunge into pro-

cesses of decoding or drift and that degrees themselves are caught up in 

movements of intensive territorialization and reterritorialization. There is 

no simple correspondence between codes and territorialities on the one 

hand and decodings and deterritorialization on the other: on the contrary, 

a code may be a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization a decoding. 

Wide gaps separate code and territoriality. The two factors nevertheless 

have the same "subject" in a stratum: it is populations that are deter-

ritorialized and reterritorialized, and also coded and decoded. In addition, 

these factors communicate or interlace in the milieus.

 

On the one hand, modifications of a code have an aleatory cause in the 

milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus, their 

compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be popularized. 

Deterritorializations and reterritorializations do not bring about the mod-

ifications; they do, however, strictly determine their selection. On the other 

hand, every modification has an associated milieu that in turn entails a 

certain deterritorialization in relation to the milieu of exteriority and a cer-

tain reterritorialization on intermediate or interior milieus. Perceptions

 

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and actions in an associated milieu, even those on a molecular level, con-

struct or produce territorial signs (indexes). This is especially true of an ani-

mal world, which is constituted, marked off by signs that divide it into 

zones (of shelter, hunting, neutrality, etc.), mobilize special organs, and 

correspond to fragments of code; this is so even at the margin of decoding 

inherent in the code. Even the domain of learning is defined by the code, or 

prescribed by it. But indexes or territorial signs are inseparable from a dou-

ble movement. Since the associated milieu always confronts a milieu of 

exteriority with which the animal is engaged and in which it takes neces-

sary risks, a line of flight must be preserved to enable the animal to regain 

its associated milieu when danger appears (for example, the bull's line of 

flight in the arena, which it uses to regain the turf it has chosen).

18

 A second 

kind of line of flight arises when the associated milieu is rocked by blows 

from the exterior, forcing the animal to abandon it and strike up an associa-

tion with new portions of exteriority, this time leaning on its interior 

milieus like fragile crutches. When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its 

associated milieu to explore land, forced to "stand on its own legs," now 

carrying water only on the inside, in the amniotic membranes protecting 

the embryo. In one way or the other, the animal is more a fleer than a 

fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations. Territorialities, then, 

are shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them 

of movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In a certain 

sense, they are secondary. They would be nothing without these move-

ments that deposit them. In short, the epistrata and parastrata are continu-

ally moving, sliding, shifting, and changing on the Ecumenon or unity of 

composition of a stratum; some are swept away by lines of flight and move-

ments of deterritorialization, others by processes of decoding or drift, but 

they all communicate at the intersection of the milieus. The strata are con-

tinually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the 

level of the substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a 

prechemical soup ...), at the level of the accumulating epistrata, or at the 

level of the abutting parastrata: everywhere there arise simultaneous accel-

erations and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterrito-

rialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization.

 

These relative movements should most assuredly not be confused with 

the possibility of absolute deterritorialization, an absolute line of flight, 

absolute drift. The former are stratic or interstratic, whereas the latter con-

cern the plane of consistency and its destratification (its "combustion," as 

Geoffroy would say). There is no doubt that mad physical particles crash 

through the strata as they accelerate, leaving minimal trace of their pas-

sage, escaping spatiotemporal and even existential coordinates as they 

tend toward a state of absolute deterritorialization, the state of unformed

 

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matter on the plane of consistency. In a certain sense, the acceleration of 

relative deterritorializations reaches the sound barrier: if the particles 

bounce off this wall, or allow themselves to be captured by black holes, they 

fall back onto the strata, into the strata's relations and milieus; but if they 

cross the barrier they reach the unformed, destratified element of the plane 

of consistency. We may even say the the abstract machines that emit and 
combine particles have two very different modes of existence: the Ecumenon 
and the Planomenon. 
Either the abstract machines remain prisoner to 

stratifications, are enveloped in a certain specific stratum whose program 

or unity of composition they define (the abstract Animal, the abstract 

chemical Body, Energy in itself) and whose movements of relative 

deterritorialization they regulate, Or, on the contrary, the abstract machine 

cuts across all stratifications, develops alone and in its own right on the 

plane of consistency whose diagram it constitutes, the same machine at 

work in astrophysics and in microphysics, in the natural and in the artifi-

cial, piloting flows of absolute deterritorialization (in no sense, of course, is 

unformed matter chaos of any kind). But this presentation is still too 

simplified.

 

First, one does not go from the relative to the absolute simply by acceler-

ation, even though increases in speed tend to have this comparative and 

global result. Absolute deterritorialization is not defined as a giant acceler-

ator; its absoluteness does not hinge on how fast it goes. It is actually possi-

ble to reach the absolute by way of phenomena of relative slowness or delay. 

Retarded development is an example. What qualifies a deterritorialization 

is not its speed (some are very slow) but its nature, whether it constitutes 

epistrata and parastrata and proceeds by articulated segments or, on the 

contrary, jumps from one singularity to another following a 

nondecom-posable, nonsegmentary line drawing a metastratum of the plane 

of consistency. Second, under no circumstances must it be thought that 

absolute deterritorialization comes suddenly of afterward, is in excess or 

beyond. That would preclude any understanding of why the strata 

themselves are animated by movements of relative deterritorialization and 

decoding that are not like accidents occurring on them. In fact, what is 

primary is an absolute deterritorialization an absolute line of flight, 

however complex or multiple—that of the plane of consistency or body 

without organs (the Earth, the absolutely deterritorialized). This absolute 

deterritorialization becomes relative only after stratification occurs on 

that plane or body: It is the strata that are always residue, not the 

opposite. The question is not how something manages to leave the strata 

by how things get into them in the first place. There is a perpetual 

immanence of absolute deterritorialization within relative 

deterritorialization; and the machinic assemblages between strata that 

regulate the differential relations and relative

 

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movements also have cutting edges of deterritorialization oriented toward 

the absolute. The plane of consistency is always immanent to the strata; the 

two states of the abstract machine always coexist as two different states of 

intensities.

 

Most of the audience had left (the first to go were the Marinetians with 

their double articulation, followed by the Hjelmslevians with their content 

and expression, and the biologists with their proteins and nucleic acids). 

The only ones left were the mathematicians, accustomed to other follies, 

along with a few astrologers, archaeologists, and scattered individuals. 

Challenger, moreover, had changed since the beginning of his talk. His 

voice had become hoarser, broken occasionally by an apish cough. His 

dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans as to provide a program 

for pure computers. Or else he was dreaming of an axiomatic, for 

axi-omatics deals essentially with stratification. Challenger was 

addressing himself to memory only. Now that we had discussed what was 

constant and what varied in a stratum from the standpoint of substances 

and forms, the question remaining to be answered was what varied 

between strata from the standpoint of content and expression. For if it is 

true that there is always a real distinction constitutive of double 

articulation, a reciprocal presupposition of content and expression, then 

what varies from one stratum to another is the nature of this real 

distinction, and the nature and respective positions of the terms 

distinguished. Let us start with a certain group of strata that can be 

characterized summarily as follows: on these strata, content (form and 

substance) is molecular, and expression (form and substance) is molar. 

The difference between the two is primarily one of order of magnitude or 

scale. Resonance, or the communication occurring between the two 

independent orders, is what institutes the stratified system. The molecular 

content of that system has its own form corresponding to the distribution 

of elemental masses and the action of one molecule upon another; 

similarly, expression has a form manifesting the statistical aggregate and 

state of equilibrium existing on the macroscopic level. Expression is like 

an "operation of amplifying structuration carrying the active properties of 

the originally microphysical discontinuity to the macrophysical level."

 

We took as our point of departure cases of this kind on the geological 

stratum, the crystalline stratum, and physicochemical strata, wherever the 

molar can be said to express microscopic molecular interactions ("the crys-

tal is the macroscopic expression of a microscopic structure"; the "crystal-

line form expresses certain atomic or molecular characteristics of the 

constituent chemical categories"). Of course, this still leaves numerous 

possibilities, depending on the number and nature of the intermediate

 

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5

8 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

states, and also on the impact of exterior forces on the formation of expres-

sion. There may be a greater or lesser number of intermediate states 

between the molecular and the molar; there may be a greater or lesser num-

ber of exterior forces or organizing centers participating in the molar form. 

Doubtless, these two factors are in an inverse relation to each other and 

indicate limit-cases. For example, the molar form of expression may be of 

the "mold" type, mobilizing a maximum of exterior forces; or it may be of 

the "modulation" type, bringing into play only a minimum number of 

them. Even in the case of the mold, however, there are nearly instantane-

ous, interior intermediate states between the molecular content that 

assumes its own specific forms and the determinate molar expression of 

the outside by the form of the mold. Conversely, even when the multiplica-

tion and temporalization of the intermediate states testify to the endo-

genous character of the molar form (as with crystals), a minimum of 

exterior forces still intervene in each of the stages.

19

 We must therefore say 

that the relative independence of content and expression, the real distinc-

tion between molecular content and molar expression with their respective 

forms, has a special status enjoying a certain amount of latitude between 

the limit-cases.

 

Since strata are judgments of God, one should not hesitate to apply all 

the subtleties of medieval Scholasticism and theology. There is a real dis-

tinction between content and expression because the corresponding forms 

are effectively distinct in the "thing" itself, and not only in the mind of the 

observer. But this real distinction is quite special; it is only formal since the 

two forms compose or shape a single thing, a single stratified subject. Vari-

ous examples of formal distinction can be cited: between scales or orders of 

magnitude (as between a map and its model; or, in a different fashion, 

between the micro- and macrophysical levels, as in the parable of 

Eddington's two offices); between the various states or formal reasons 

through which a thing passes; between the thing in one form, and as 

affected by a possibly exterior causality giving it a different form; and so 

forth. (There is a proliferation of distinct forms because, in addition to 

content and expression each having its own forms, intermediate states 

introduce forms of expression proper to content and forms of content 

proper to expression.)

 

As diverse and real as formal distinctions are, on the organic stratum the 

very nature of the distinction changes. As a result, the entire distribution 

between content and expression is different. The organic stratum never-

theless preserves, and even amplifies, the relation between the molecular 

and the molar, with all kinds of intermediate states. We saw this in the case 

of morphogenesis, where double articulation is inseparable from a com-

munication between two orders of magnitude. The same thing applies to

 

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0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 59

 

cellular chemistry. But the organic stratum has a unique character that 

must account for the amplifications. In a preceding discussion, expression 

was dependent upon the expressed molecular content in all directions and 

in every dimension and had independence only to the extent that it 

appealed to a higher order of magnitude and to exterior forces: The real dis-

tinction was between forms, but forms belonging to the same aggregate, the 

same thing or subject. Now, however, expression becomes independent in its 
own right, in other words, autonomous. 
Before, the coding of a stratum was 

coextensive with that stratum; on the organic stratum, on the other hand, it 

takes place on an autonomous and independent line that detaches as much 

as possible from the second and third dimensions. Expression ceases to be 

voluminous or superficial, becoming linear, unidimensional (even in its 

segmentarity). The essential thing is the linearity of the nucleic sequence.

20 

The real distinction between content and expression, therefore, is not sim-

ply formal. It is strictly speaking real, and passes into the molecular, with-

out regard to order of magnitude. It is between two classes of molecules, 

nucleic acids of expression and proteins of content, nucleic elements or 

nucleotides and protein elements or amino acids. Both expression and 

content are now molecular and molar. The distinction no longer concerns a 

single aggregate or subject; linearity takes us further in the direction of flat 

multiplicities, rather than unity. Expression involves nucleotides and 

nucleic acids as well as molecules that, in their substance and form, are 

entirely independent not only of molecules of content but of any directed 

action in the exterior milieu. Thus invariance is a characteristic of certain 

molecules and is not found exclusively on the molar scale. Conversely, pro-

teins, in their substance and form of content, are equally independent of 

nucleotides: the only thing univocally determined is that one amino acid 

rather than another corresponds to a sequence of three nucleotides.

2

' What 

the linear form of expression determines is therefore a derivative form of 

expression, one that is relative to content and that, through a folding back 

upon itself of the protein sequence of the amino acids, finally yields the 

characteristic three-dimensional structures. In short, what is specific to the 

organic stratum is this alignment of expression, this exhaustion or detach-
ment of a line of expression, 
this reduction of form and substance of expres-

sion to a unidimensional line, guaranteeing their reciprocal independence 

from content without having to account for orders of magnitude.

 

This has many consequences. The new configuration of expression and 

content conditions not only the organism's power to reproduce but also its 

power to deterritorialize or accelerate deterritorialization. The alignment 

of the code or linearity of the nucleic sequence in fact marks a threshold of 

deterritorialization of the "sign" that gives it a new ability to be copied and 

makes the organism more deterritorialized than a crystal: only something

 

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60 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

deterritorialized is capable of reproducing itself. When content and 

expression are divided along the lines of the molecular and the molar, sub-

stances move from state to state, from the preceding state to the following 

state, or from layer to layer, from an already constituted layer to a layer in 

the process of forming, while forms install themselves at the limit between 

the last layer or last state and the exterior milieu. Thus the stratum devel-

ops into epistrata and parastrata; this is accomplished through a set of 
inductions from layer to layer and state to state, or at the limit. A crystal dis-

plays this process in its pure state, since its form expands in all directions, 

but always as a function of the surface layer of the substance, which can be 

emptied of most of its interior without interfering with the growth. It is the 

crystal's subjugation to three-dimensionality, in other words its index of 

territoriality, that makes the structure incapable of formally reproducing 

and expressing itself; only the accessible surface can reproduce itself, since 

it is the only deterritorializable part. On the contrary, the detachment of a 

pure line of expression on the organic stratum makes it possible for the 

organism to attain a much higher threshold of deterritorialization, gives it 

a mechanism of reproduction covering all the details of its complex spatial 

structure, and enables it to put all of its interior layers "topologically in 

contact" with the exterior, or rather with the polarized limit (hence the spe-

cial role of the living membrane). The development of the stratum into 

epistrata and parastrata occurs not through simple inductions but through 
transductions that account for the amplification of the resonance between 

the molecular and the molar, independently of order of magnitude; for the 

functional efficacy of the interior substances, independently of distance; 

and for the possibility of a proliferation and even interlacing of forms, 

independently of codes (surplus values of code or phenomena of trans-

coding or aparallel evolution).

22

 

There is a third major grouping of strata, defined less by a human 

essence than, once again, by a new distribution of content and expression. 

Form of content becomes "alloplastic" rather than "homoplastic"; in other 

words, it brings about modifications in the external world. Form of expres-

sion becomes linguistic rather than genetic; in other words, it operates with 

symbols that are comprehensible, transmittable, and modifiable from out-

side. What some call the properties of human beings—technology and 

language, tool and symbol, free hand and supple larynx, "gesture and 

speech"—are in fact properties of this new distribution. It would be diffi-

cult to maintain that the emergence of human beings marked the absolute 

origin of this distribution. Leroi-Gourhan's analyses give us an under-

standing of how contents came to be linked with the hand-tool couple and 

expressions with the face-language couple.

23

 In this context, the hand must 

not be thought of simply as an organ but instead as a coding (the digital

 

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0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 61

 

code), a dynamic structuration, a dynamic formation (the manual form, or 

manual formal traits). The hand as a general form of content is extended in 

tools, which are themselves active forms implying substances, or formed 

matters; finally, products are formed matters, or substances, which in turn 

serve as tools. Whereas manual formal traits constitute the unity of compo-

sition of the stratum, the forms and substances of tools and products are 

organized into parastrata and epistrata that themselves function as verita-

ble strata and mark discontinuities, breakages, communications and diffu-

sions, nomadisms and sedentarities, multiple thresholds and speeds of 

relative deterritorialization in human populations. For with the hand as a 

formal trait or general form of content a major threshold of deterri-

torialization is reached and opens, an accelerator that in itself permits a 

shifting interplay of comparative deterritorializations and 

reterritorial-izations—what makes this acceleration possible is, precisely, 

phenomena of "retarded development" in the organic substrata. Not only is 

the hand a deterritorialized front paw; the hand thus freed is itself 

deterritorialized in relation to the grasping and locomotive hand of the 

monkey. The synergistic deterritorializations of other organs (for 

example, the foot) must be taken into account. So must correlative 

deterritorializations of the milieu: the steppe as an associated milieu more 

deterritorialized than the forest, exerting a selective pressure of 

deterritorialization upon the body and technology (it was on the steppe, not 

in the forest, that the hand was able to appear as a free form, and fire as a 

technologically formable matter). Finally, complementary 

reterritorializations must be taken into account (the foot as a 

compensatory reterritorialization for the hand, also occurring on the 

steppe). Maps should be made of these things, organic, ecological, and 

technological maps one can lay out on the plane of consistency.

 

On the other hand, language becomes the new form of expression, or 

rather the set of formal traits defining the new expression in operation 

throughout the stratum. Just as manual traits exist only in forms and 

formed matters that shatter their continuity and determine the distribution 

of their effects, formal traits of expression exist only in a diversity of 

formal languages and imply one or several formable substances. The sub-

stance involved is fundamentally vocal substance, which brings into play 

various organic elements: not only the larynx, but the mouth and lips, and 

the overall motricity of the face. Once again, a whole intensive map must 

be accounted for: the mouth as a deterritorialization of the snout (the 

whole "conflict between the mouth and the brain," as Perrier called it); the 

lips as a deterritorialization of the mouth (only humans have lips, in other 

words, an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes; only human 

females have breasts, in other words, deterritorialized mammary glands:

 

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2 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

the extended nursing period advantageous for language learning is accom-

panied by a complementary reterritorialization of the lips on the breasts, 

and the breasts on the lips). What a curious deterritorialization, filling 

one's mouth with words instead of food and noises. The steppe, once more, 

seems to have exerted strong pressures of selection: the "supple larynx" is a 

development corresponding to the free hand and could have arisen only in 

a deforested milieu where it is no longer necessary to have gigantic laryn-

geal sacks in order for one's cries to be heard above the constant din of the 

forest. To articulate, to speak, is to speak softly. Everyone knows that lum-

berjacks rarely talk.

24

 Physiological, acoustic, and vocal substance are not 

the only things that undergo all these deterritorializations. The form of 

expression, as language, also crosses a threshold.

 

Vocal signs have temporal linearity, and it is this superlinearity that con-

stitutes their specific deterritorialization and differentiates them from 

genetic linearity. Genetic linearity is above all spatial, even though its seg-

ments are constructed and reproduced in succession; thus at this level it 

does not require effective overcoding of any kind, only phenomena of 

end-to-end connection, local regulations, and partial interactions 

(overcoding takes place only at the level of integrations implying 

different orders of magnitude). That is why Jacob is reluctant to compare 

the genetic code to a language; in fact, the genetic code has neither 

emitter, receiver, comprehension, nor translation, only redundancies and 

surplus values.

25

 The temporal linearity of language expression relates not 

only to a succession but to a formal synthesis of succession in which time 

constitutes a process of linear overcoding and engenders a phenomenon 

unknown on the other strata: translation, translatability, as opposed to the 

previous inductions and transductions. Translation should not be 

understood simply as the ability of one language to "represent" in some 

way the givens of another language, but beyond that as the ability of 

language, with its own givens on its own stratum, to represent all the 

other strata and thus achieve a scientific conception of the world. The 

scientific world {Welt,  as opposed to the Umwelt  of the animal) is the 

translation of all of the flows, particles, codes, and territorialities of the 

other strata into a sufficiently deterritorialized system of signs, in other 

words, into an overcoding specific to language. This property of 
overcoding  or  superlinearity  explains why, in language, not only is 

expression independent of content, but form of expression is independent 

of substance: translation is possible because the same form can pass from 

one substance to another, which is not the case for the genetic code, for 

example, between RNA and DNA chains. We will see later on how this situ-

ation gives rise to certain imperialist pretentions on behalf of language, 

which are naively expressed in such formulas as: "Every semiology of a 

nonlinguistic system must use the medium of language... .Language is the

 

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0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 63

 

interpreter of all the other systems, linguistic and nonlinguistic." This 

amounts to defining an abstract character of language and then saying that 

the other strata can share in that character only by being spoken in lan-

guage. That is stating the obvious. More positively, it must be noted that 

the immanence within language of universal translation means that its 

epistrata and parastrata, with respect to superpositions, diffusions, com-

munications, and abutments, operate in an entirely different manner than 

those of other strata: all human movements, even the most violent, imply 

translations.

 

We have to hurry, Challenger said, we're being rushed by the line of time 

on this third stratum. So we have a new organization of content and 

expression, each with its own forms and substances: technological content, 

semiotic or symbolic expression. Content should be understood not sim-

ply as the hand and tools but as a technical social machine that preexists 

them and constitutes states of force or formations of power. Expression 

should be understood not simply as the face and language, or individual 

languages, but as a semiotic collective machine that preexists them and 

constitutes regimes of signs. A formation of power is much more than a 

tool; a regime of signs is much more than a language. Rather, they act as 

determining and selective agents, as much in the constitution of languages 

and tools as in their usages and mutual or respective diffusions and com-

munications. The third stratum sees the emergence of Machines that are 

fully a part of that stratum but at the same time rear up and stretch their 

pincers out in all directions at all the other strata. Is this not like an interme-
diate state between the two states of the abstract Machine?
—the state in 

which it remains enveloped in a corresponding stratum (ecumenon), and 

the state in which it develops in its own right on the destratified plane of 

consistency (planomenon). The abstract machine begins to unfold, to 

stand to full height, producing an illusion exceeding all strata, even though 

the machine itself still belongs to a determinate stratum. This is, obviously, 

the illusion constitutive of man (who does man think he is?). This illusion 

derives from the overcoding immanent to language itself. But what is not 

illusory are the new distributions between content and expression: techno-

logical content characterized by the hand-tool relation and, at a deeper 

level, tied to a social Machine and formations of power; symbolic expres-

sion characterized by face-language relations and, at a deeper level, tied to 

a semiotic Machine and regimes of signs. On both sides, the epistrata and 

parastrata, the superposed degrees and abutting forms, attain more than 

ever before the status of autonomous strata in their own right. In cases 

where we can discern two different regimes of signs or two different forma-

tions of power, we shall say that they are in fact two different strata in 

human populations.

 

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What precisely is the relation now between content and expression, and 

what type of distinction is there between them? It's all in the head. Yet 

never was a distinction more real. What we are trying to say is that there is 

indeed one exterior milieu for the entire stratum, permeating the entire 

stratum: the cerebral-nervous milieu. It comes from the organic substra-

tum, but of course that substratum does not merely play the role of a sub-

stratum or passive support. It is no less complex in organization. Rather, it 

constitutes the prehuman soup immersing us. Our hands and faces are 

immersed in it. The brain is a population, a set of tribes tending toward two 

poles. In Leroi-Gourhan's analyses of the constitution of these two poles in 

the soup—one of which depends on the actions of the face, the other on the 

hand—their correlation or relativity does not preclude a real distinction 

between them; quite the contrary, it entails one, as the reciprocal presuppo-

sition of two articulations, the manual articulation of content and the 

facial articulation of expression. And the distinction is not simply real, as 

between molecules, things, or subjects; it has become essential  (as they 

used to say in the Middle Ages), as between attributes, genres of being, or 

irreducible categories: things and words. Yet we find that the most general 

of movements, the one by which each of the distinct articulations is already 

double in its own right, carries over onto this level; certain formal elements 

of content play the role of expression in relation to content proper, and cer-

tain formal elements of expression play the role of content in relation to 

expression proper. In the first case, Leroi-Gourhan shows how the hand 

creates a whole world of symbols, a whole pluridimensional language, not 

to be confused with unilinear verbal language, which constitutes a radiat-

ing expression specific to content (he sees this as the origin of writing).

26 

The second case is clearly displayed in the double articulation specific to 

language itself, since phonemes form a radiating content specific to the 

expression of monemes as linear significant segments (it is only under 

these conditions that double articulation as a general characteristic of 

strata has the linguistic meaning Martinet attributes to it). Our discussion 

of the relations between content and expression, the real distinction 

between them, and the variations of those relations and that distinction on 

the major types of strata, is now provisionally complete.

 

Challenger wanted to go faster and faster. No one was left, but he went on 

anyway. The change in his voice, and in his appearance, was growing more 

and more pronounced. Something animalistic in him had begun to speak 

when he started talking about human beings. You still couldn't put your 

finger on it, but Challenger seemed to be deterritorializing on the spot. He 

still had three problems he wanted to discuss. The first seemed primarily 

terminological: Under what circumstances may we speak of signs? Should 

we say they are everywhere on all the strata and that there is a sign when-

 

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ever there is a form of expression? We may summarily distinguish three 

kinds of signs: indexes (territorial signs), symbols (deterritorialized signs), 
and icons (signs of reterritorialization). 
Should we say that there are signs 

on all the strata, under the pretext that every stratum includes territoriali-

ties and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization? This 

kind of expansive method is very dangerous, because it lays the ground-

work for or reinforces the imperialism of language, if only by relying on its 

function as universal translator or interpreter. It is obvious that there is no 

system of signs common to all strata, not even in the form of a semiotic 

"chora" theoretically prior to symbolization.

27

 It would appear that we 

may accurately speak of signs only when there is a distinction between 

forms of expression and forms of content that is not only real but also cate-

gorical. Under these conditions, there is a semiotic system on the corre-

sponding stratum because the abstract machine has precisely that fully 

erect posture that permits it to "write," in other words, to treat language 

and extract a regime of signs from it. But before it reaches that point, in 

so-called natural codings, the abstract machine remains enveloped in the 

strata: It does not write in any way and has no margin of latitude allowing it 

to recognize something as a sign (except in the strictly territorial sense of 

animal signs). After that point, the abstract machine develops on the plane 

of consistency and no longer has any way of making a categorical distinc-

tion between signs and particles; for example, it writes, but flush with the 

real, it inscribes directly upon the plane of consistency. It therefore seems 

reasonable to reserve the word "sign" in the strict sense for the last group of 

strata. This terminological discussion would be entirely without interest if 

it did not bring us to yet another danger: not the imperialism of language 

affecting all of the strata, but the imperialism of the signifier affecting lan-

guage itself, affecting all regimes of signs and the entire expanse of the 

strata upon which they are located. The question here is not whether there 

are signs on every stratum but whether all signs are signifiers, whether all 

signs are endowed with signifiance, whether the semiotic of signs is neces-

sarily linked to a semiology of the signifier. Those who take this route may 

even be led to forgo the notion of the sign, for the primacy of the signifier 

over language guarantees the primacy of language over all of the strata even 

more effectively than the simple expansion of the sign in all directions. 

What we are saying is that the illusion specific to this posture of the abstract 

Machine, the illusion that one can grasp and shuffle all the strata between 

one's pincers, can be better secured through the erection of the signifier 

than through the extension of the sign (thanks to signifiance, language can 

claim to be in direct contact with the strata without having to go through 

the supposed signs on each one). But we're still going in the same circle, 

we're still spreading the same canker.

 

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The linguistic relation between the signifier and signified has, of course, 

been conceived in many different ways. It has been said that they are 

arbitrary; that they are as necessary to each other as the two sides of the 

same leaf; that they correspond term by term, or else globally; and that they 

are so ambivalent as to be indistinguishable. In any event, the signified is 

thought not to exist outside of its relationship with signifier, and the ulti-

mate signified is the very existence of the signifier, extrapolated beyond the 

sign. There is only one thing that can be said about the signifier: it is Redun-

dancy, it is the Redundant. Hence its incredible despotism, and its success. 

Theories of arbitrariness, necessity, term-by-term or global correspon-

dence, and ambivalence serve the same cause: the reduction of expression 

to the signifier. Yet forms of content and forms of expression are highly 

relative, always in a state of reciprocal presupposition. The relations 

between their respective segments are biunivocal, exterior, and "de-

formed." There is never conformity between the two, or from one to the 

other. There is always real independence and a real distinction; even to fit 

the forms together, and to determine the relations between them, requires a 

specific, variable assemblage. None of these characteristics applies to the 

signifier-signified relation, even though some seem to coincide with it par-

tially and accidentally. Overall, these characteristics stand in radical oppo-

sition to the scenario of the signifier. A form of content is not a signified, 

any more than a form of expression is a signifier.

28

 This is true for all the 

strata, including those on which language plays a role.

 

Signifier enthusiasts take an oversimplified situation as their implicit 

model: word and thing. From the word they extract the signifier, and from 

the thing a signified in conformity with the word, and therefore subjugated 

to the signifier. They operate in a sphere interior to and homogeneous with 

language. Let us follow Foucault in his exemplary analysis, which, though 

it seems not to be, is eminently concerned with linguistics. Take a thing like 

the prison: the prison is a form, the "prison-form"; it is a form of content on 

a stratum and is related to other forms of content (school, barracks, hospi-

tal, factory). This thing or form does not refer back to the word "prison" 

but to entirely different words and concepts, such as "delinquent" and 

"delinquency," which express a new way of classifying, stating, translating, 

and even committing criminal acts. "Delinquency" is the form of expres-

sion in reciprocal presupposition with the form of content "prison." Delin-

quency is in no way a signifier, even a juridical signifier, the signified of 

which would be the prison. That would flatten the entire analysis. More-

over, the form of expression is reducible not to words but to a set of state-

ments arising in the social field considered as a stratum (that is what a 

regime of signs is). The form of content is reducible not to a thing but to a 

complex state of things as a formation of power (architecture, regimenta-

 

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tion, etc.). We could say that there are two constantly intersecting multipli-

cities, "discursive multiplicities" of expression and "nondiscursive multi-

plicities" of content. It is even more complex than that because the prison 

as a form of content has a relative expression all its own; there are all kinds 

of statements specific to it that do not necessarily coincide with the state-

ments of delinquency. Conversely, delinquency as a form of expression has 

an autonomous content all its own, since delinquency expresses not only a 

new way of evaluating crimes but a new way of committing them. Form of 

content and form of expression, prison and delinquency: each has its own 

history, microhistory, segments. At most, along with other contents and 

expressions, they imply a shared state of the abstract Machine acting not at 

all as a signifier but as a kind of diagram (a single abstract machine for the 

prison and the school and the barracks and the hospital and the factory 

...). Fitting the two types of forms together, segments of content and 

segments of expression, requires a whole double-pincered, or rather 

double-headed, concrete assemblage taking their real distinction into 

account. It requires a whole organization articulating formations of power 

and regimes of signs, and operating on the molecular level (societies char-

acterized by what Foucault calls disciplinary power).

29

 In short, we should 

never oppose words to things that supposedly correspond to them, nor 

signifiers to signifieds that are supposedly in conformity with them. What 

should be opposed are distinct formalizations, in a state of unstable equi-

librium or reciprocal presupposition. "// is in vain that we say what we see; 
what we see never resides in what wesay."

i0

 As in school: there is not just one 

writing lesson, that of the great redundant Signifier for any and all 

signifieds. There are two distinct formalizations in reciprocal presupposi-

tion and constituting a double-pincer: the formalization of expression in 

the reading and writing lesson (with its own relative contents), and the 

formalization of content in the lesson of things (with their own relative 

expressions). We are never signifier or signified. We are stratified.

 

The preferred method would be severely restrictive, as opposed to the 

expansive method that places signs on all strata or signifier in all signs 

(although at the limit it may forgo signs entirely). First, there exist forms of 

expression without signs (for example, the genetic code has nothing to do 

with a language). It is only under certain conditions that strata can be said 

to include signs; signs cannot be equated with language in general but are 

defined by regimes of statements that are so many real usages or functions 

of language. Then why retain the word sign for these regimes, which forma-

lize an expression without designating or signifying the simultaneous con-

tents, which are formalized in a different way? Signs are not signs of a thing; 

they are signs of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they mark a 

certain threshold crossed in the course of these movements, and it is for

 

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this reason that the word should be retained (as we have seen, this applies 

even to animal "signs").

 

Next, if we consider regimes of signs using this restrictive definition, we 

see that they are not, or not necessarily, signifiers. Just as signs designate 

only a certain formalization of expression in a determinate group of strata, 

signifiance itself designates only one specific regime among a number of 

regimes existing in that particular formalization. Just as there are 

ase-miotic expressions, or expressions without signs, there are 

asemiological regimes of signs, asignifying signs, both on the strata and 

on the plane of consistency. The most that can be said of signifiance is that 

it characterizes one  regime, which is not even the most interesting or 

modern or contemporary one, but is perhaps only more pernicious, 

cancerous, and despotic than the others, and more steeped in illusion than 

they.

 

In any case, content and expression are never reducible to 

signified-signifier. And (this is the second problem) neither are they 

reducible to base-superstructure. One can no more posit a primacy of 

content as the determining factor than a primacy of expression as a 

signifying system. Expression can never be made into a form reflecting 

content, even if one endows it with a "certain" amount of independence 

and a certain potential for reacting, if only because so-called economic 

content already has a form and even forms of expression that are specific 

to it. Form of content and form of expression involve two parallel 

formalizations in presupposition: it is obvious that their segments 

constantly intertwine, embed themselves in one another; but this is 

accomplished by the abstract machine from which the two forms derive, 

and by machinic assemblages that regulate their relations. If this 

parallelism is replaced by a pyramidal image, then content (including its 

form) becomes an economic base of production displaying all of the 

characteristics of the Abstract; the assemblages become the first story of a 

superstructure that, as such, is necessarily situated within a State 

apparatus; the regimes of signs and forms of expression become the 

second story of the superstructure, defined by ideology. It isn't altogether 

clear where language should go, since the great Despot decided that it 

should be reserved a special place, as the common good of the nation and 

the vehicle for information. Thus one misconstrues the nature of language, 

which exists only in heterogeneous regimes of signs, and rather than 

circulating information distributes contradictory orders. It misconstrues 

the nature of regimes of signs, which express organizations of power or 

assemblages and have nothing to do with ideology as the supposed expres-

sion of a content (ideology is a most execrable concept obscuring all of the 

effectively operating social machines). It misconstrues the nature of orga-

nizations of power, which are in no way located within a State apparatus 

but rather are everywhere, effecting formalizations of content and expres-

 

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sion, the segments of which they intertwine. Finally, it misconstrues the 
nature of content, which is in no way economic "in the last instance," since 
there are as many directly economic signs or expressions as there are 
noneconomic contents. Nor can the status of social formations be analyzed 
by throwing some signifier into the base, or vice versa, or a bit of phallus or 
castration into political economy, or a bit of economics or politics into 
psychoanalysis.

 

There is a third problem. It is difficult to elucidate the system of the 

strata without seeming to introduce a kind of cosmic or even spiritual evo-
lution from one to the other, as if they were arranged in stages and ascended 
degrees of perfection. Nothing of the sort. The different figures of content 
and expression are not stages. There is no biosphere or noosphere, but 
everywhere the same Mechanosphere. If one begins by considering the 
strata in themselves, it cannot be said that one is less organized than 
another. This even applies to a stratum serving as a substratum: there is no 
fixed order, and one stratum can serve directly as a substratum for another 
without the intermediaries one would expect there to be from the stand-
point of stages and degrees (for example, microphysical sectors can serve as 
an immediate substratum for organic phenomena). Or the apparent order 
can be reversed, with cultural or technical phenomena providing a fertile 
soil, a good soup, for the development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even 
particles. The industrial age defined as the age of insects ... It's even worse 
nowadays: you can't even tell in advance which stratum is going to commu-
nicate with which other, or in what direction. Above all, there is no lesser, 
no higher or lower, organization; the substratum is an integral part of the 
stratum, is bound up with it as the milieu in which change occurs, and not 
an increase in organization.

31

 Furthermore, if we consider the plane of con-

sistency we note that the most disparate of things and signs move upon it: a 
semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron 
crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystalli-
zation produces a passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter... There 
is no "like" here, we are not saying "like an electron," "like an interaction," 
etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that con-
sists is Real. These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, actual 
organites, authentic sign sequences. It's just that they have been uprooted 
from their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialized, and that is what 
makes their proximity and interpenetration in the plane of consistency 
possible. A silent dance. The plane of consistency knows nothing of differ-
ences in level, orders of magnitude, or distances. It knows nothing of the dif-
ference between the artificial and the natural. It knows nothing of the 
distinction between contents and expressions, or that between forms and

 

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formed substances; these things exist only by means of and in relation to the 

strata.

 

But how can one still identify and name things if they have lost the strata 

that qualified them, if they have gone into absolute deterritorialization? 

Eyes are black holes, but what are black holes and eyes outside their strata 

and territorialities? What it comes down to is that we cannot content our-

selves with a dualism or summary opposition between the strata and the 

destratified plane of consistency. The strata themselves are animated and 

defined by relative speeds of deterritorialization; moreover, absolute 

deterritorialization is there from the beginning, and the strata are spin-

offs, thickenings on a plane of consistency that is everywhere, always pri-

mary and always immanent. In addition, the plane of consistency is 

occupied, drawn by the abstract Machine; the abstract Machine exists 
simultaneously  developed on the destratified plane it draws, and envel-

oped in each stratum whose unity of composition it defines, and even 

half-erected in certain strata whose form of prehension it defines. That 

which races or dances upon the plane of consistency thus carries with it the 

aura of its stratum, an undulation, a memory or tension. The plane of 

consistency retains just enough of the strata to extract from them variables 

that operate in the plane of consistency as its own functions. The plane of 

consistency, or planomenon, is in no way an undifferentiated aggregate 

of unformed matters, but neither is it a chaos of formed matters of every 

kind. It is true that on the plane of consistency there are no longer forms 

or substances, content or expression, respective and relative 

deterritorializations. But beneath the forms and substances of the strata 

the plane of consistency (or the abstract machine) constructs continuums 
of intensity: 
it creates continuity for intensities that it extracts from 

distinct forms and substances. Beneath contents and expressions the plane 

of consistency (or the abstract machine) emits and combines 
particles-signs 
that set the most asignifying of signs to functioning in the 

most deterritorialized of particles. Beneath relative movements the plane 

of consistency (or the abstract machine) performs conjunctions of flows of 
deterritorialization  
that transform the respective indexes into absolute 

values. The only intensities known to the strata are discontinuous, bound 

up in forms and substances; the only particles are divided into particles of 

content and articles of expression; the only deterritorialized flows are 

disjointed and reterritorialized. Continuum of intensities, combined 

emission of particles or signs-particles, conjunction of deterritorialized 

flows: these are the three factors proper to the plane of consistency; they 

are brought about by the abstract machine and are constitutive of 

destratification. Now there is no hint in all of this of a chaotic white 

night or an undifferentiated black night. There are rules, rules of 

"plan(n)ing," of diagramming, as we will see later on, or elsewhere. The

 

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abstract machine is not random; the continuities, emissions and combina-

tions, and conjunctions do not occur in just any fashion.

 

A final distinction must now be noted. Not only does the abstract 

machine have different simultaneous states accounting for the complex-

ity of what takes place on the plane of consistency, but the abstract 

machine should not be confused with what we call a concrete machinic 

assemblage. The abstract machine sometimes develops upon the plane of 

consistency, whose continuums, emissions, and conjugations it con-

structs, and sometimes remains enveloped in a stratum whose unity of 

composition and force of attraction or prehension it defines. The 
machinic assemblage is something entirely different from the abstract 

machine, even though it is very closely connected with it. First, on a stra-

tum, it performs the coadaptations of content and expression, ensures 

biunivocal relationships between segments of content and segments of 

expression, and guides the division of the stratum into epistrata and 

parastrata. Next, between strata, it ensures the relation to whatever serves 

as a substratum and brings about the corresponding changes in 

organization. Finally, it is in touch with the plane of consistency because 

it necessarily effectuates the abstract machine on a particular stratum, 

between strata, and in the relation between the strata and the plane. An 

assemblage (for example, the smith's anvil among the Dogons) is neces-

sary for the articulations of the organic stratum to come about. An assem-

blage is necessary for the relation between two strata to come about. And 

an assemblage is necessary for organisms to be caught within and perme-

ated by a social field that utilizes them: Must not the Amazons amputate a 

breast to adapt the organic stratum to a warlike technological stratum, as 

though at the behest of a fearsome woman-bow-steppe assemblage? 

Assemblages are necessary for states offeree and regimes of signs to inter-

twine their relations. Assemblages are necessary in order for the unity of 

composition enveloped in a stratum, the relations between a given stra-

tum and the others, and the relation between these strata and the plane of 

consistency to be organized rather than random. In every respect, 

machinic assemblages effectuate  the abstract machine insofar as it is 

developed on the plane of consistency or enveloped in a stratum. The 

most important problem of all: given a certain machinic assemblage, 

what is its relation of effectuation with the abstract machine? How does it 

effectuate it, with what adequation? Classify assemblages. What we call 

the mechanosphere is the set of all abstract machines and machinic 

assemblages outside the strata, on the strata, or between strata.

 

The system of the strata thus has nothing to do with signifier and signi-

fied, base and superstructure, mind and matter. All of these are ways of 

reducing the strata to a single stratum, or of closing the system in on itself

 

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by cutting it off from the plane of consistency as destratification. We had to 

summarize before we lost our voice. Challenger was finishing up. His voice 

had become unbearably shrill. He was suffocating. His hands were becom-

ing elongated pincers that had become incapable of grasping anything but 

could still vaguely point to things. Some kind of matter seemed to be pour-

ing out from the double mask, the two heads; it was impossible to tell 

whether it was getting thicker or more watery. Some of the audience had 

returned, but only shadows and prowlers. "You hear that? It's an animal's 

voice." So the summary would have to be quick, the terminology would 

have to be set down as well as possible, for no good reason. There was a first 

group of notions: the Body without Organs or the destratified Plane of 

Consistency; the Matter of the Plane, that which occurs on the body or 

plane (singular, nonsegmented multiplicities composed of intensive con-

tinuums, emissions of particles-signs, conjunctions of flows); and the 

abstract Machine, or abstract Machines, insofar as they construct that 

body or draw that plane or "diagram" what occurs (lines of flight, or abso-

lute deterritorializations).

 

Then there was the system of the strata. On the intensive continuum, the 

strata fashion forms and form matters into substances. In combined emis-

sions, they make the distinction between expressions and contents, units of 

expression and units of content, for example, signs and particles. In con-

junctions, they separate flows, assigning them relative movements and 

diverse territorialities, relative deterritorializations and complementary 

reterritorializations. Thus the strata set up everywhere double articula-

tions animated by movements: forms and substances of content and forms 

and substances of expression constituting segmentary multiplicities with 

relations that are determinable in every case. Such are the strata. Each stra-

tum is a double articulation of content and expression, both of which are 

really distinct and in a state of reciprocal presupposition. Content and 

expression intermingle, and it is two-headed machinic assemblages that 

place their segments in relation. What varies from stratum to stratum is the 

nature of the real distinction between content and expression, the nature of 

the substances as formed matters, and the nature of the relative move-

ments. We may make a summary distinction between three major types of 

real distinction: the real-formal distinction between orders of magnitude, 

with the establishment of a resonance of expression (induction); the 

real-real distinction between different subjects, with the establishment of 

a linearity of expression (transduction); and the real-essential distinction 

between different attributes or categories, with the establishment of a 

superlinearity of expression (translation).

 

Each stratum serves as the substratum for another stratum. Each stra-

tum has a unity of composition defined by its milieu, substantial elements,

 

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and formal traits (Ecumenon). But it divides into parastrata according to 

its irreducible forms and associated milieus, and into epistrata according 

to its layers of formed substances and intermediary milieus. Epistrata and 

parastrata must themselves be thought of as strata. A machinic assemblage 

is an interstratum insofar as it regulates the relations between strata, as well 

as the relations between contents and expressions on each stratum, in 

conformity with the preceding divisions. A single assemblage can borrow 

from different strata, and with a certain amount of apparent disorder; 

conversely, a stratum or element of a stratum can join others in function-

ing in a different assemblage. Finally, the machinic assemblage is a 
metastratum because it is also in touch with the plane of consistency and 

necessarily effectuates the abstract machine. The abstract machine exists 

enveloped in each stratum, whose Ecumenon or unity of composition it 

defines, and developed on the plane of consistency, whose destratification 

it performs (the Planomenon). Thus when the assemblages fit together the 

variables of a stratum as a function of its unity, they also bring about a spe-

cific effectuation of the abstract machine as it exists outside the strata. 

Machinic assemblages are simultaneously located at the intersection of the 

contents and expression on each stratum, and at the intersection of all of 

the strata with the plane of consistency. They rotate in all directions, like 

beacons.

 

It was over. Only later on would all of this take on concrete meaning. The 

double-articulated mask had come undone, and so had the gloves and the 

tunic, from which liquids escaped. As they streamed away they seemed to 

eat at the strata of the lecture hall, which was filled with fumes of olibanum 

and "hung with strangely figured arras." Disarticulated, deterritorialized, 

Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with him, that he was 

leaving for the mysterious world, his poison garden. He whispered some-

thing else: it is by headlong flight that things progress and signs proliferate. 

Panic is creation. A young woman cried out, her face "convulsed with a 

wilder, deeper, and more hideous epilepsy of stark panic than they had seen 

on human countenance before." No one had heard the summary, and no 

one tried to keep Challenger from leaving. Challenger, or what remained of 

him, slowly hurried toward the plane of consistency, following a bizarre tra-

jectory with nothing relative left about it. He tried to slip into an assem-

blage serving as a drum-gate, the particle Clock with its intensive clicking 

and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute: "The figure slumped 

oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort

 

of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock ___ The figure had now reached

 

the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a 

blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling 

made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped

 

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case and pulled the door shut after it.... The abnormal clicking went on, 

beating out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical 

gate-openings"

32

—the Mechanosphere, or rhizosphere.

 

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4. November 20, 1923—Postulates of 

Linguistics

 

 

The Order-word Assemblage

 

I. "Language Is Informational and Communicationai"

 

When the schoolmistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or 
arithmetic, she is not informing them, any more than she is informing her-
self when she questions a student. She does not so much instruct as 
"insign," give orders or commands. A teacher's commands are not external 
or additional to what he or she teaches us. They do not flow from primary 
significations or result from information: an order always and already con-
cerns prior orders, which is why ordering is redundancy. The compulsory 
education machine does not communicate information; it imposes upon 
the child semiotic coordinates possessing all of the dual foundations of

 

75

 

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grammar (masculine-feminine, singular-plural, noun-verb, subject of the 

statement-subject of enunciation, etc.). The elementary unit of language— 

the statement—is the order-word.

1

 Rather than common sense, a faculty 

for the centralization of information, we must define an abominable 

faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words. 

Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedi-

ence. "The baroness has not the slightest intention of convincing me of her 

sincerity; she is simply indicating that she prefers to see me pretend to 

agree."

2

 We see this in police or government announcements, which often 

have little plausibility or truthfulness, but say very clearly what should be 

observed and retained. The indifference to any kind of credibility exhib-

ited by these announcements often verges on provocation. This is proof 

that the issue lies elsewhere. Let people say...: that is all language 

demands. Spengler notes that the fundamental forms of speech are not the 

statement of a judgment or the expression of a feeling, but "the command, 

the expression of obedience, the assertion, the question, the affirmation or 

negation," very short phrases that command life and are inseparable from 

enterprises and large-scale projects: "Ready?" "Yes." "Go ahead."

3

 Words 

are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give 

workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power marker before 

it is a syntactical marker. The order does not refer to prior significations or 

to a prior organization of distinctive units. Quite the opposite. Informa-

tion is only the strict minimum necessary for the emission, transmission, 

and observation of orders as commands. One must be just informed 

enough not to confuse "Fire!" with "Fore!" or to avoid the unfortunate situ-

ation of the teacher and the student as described by Lewis Carroll (the 

teacher, at the top of the stairs, asks a question that is passed on by servants, 

who distort it at each step of the way, and the student, below in the court-

yard, returns an answer that is also distorted at each stage of the trip back). 

Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and 

waits.

4

 Every order-word, even a father's to his son, carries a little death 

sentence—a Judgment, as Kafka put it.

 

The hard part is to specify the status and scope of the order-word. It is 

not a question of the origin of language, since the order-word is only a 

language-function, a function coextensive with language. If language 

always seems to presuppose itself, if we cannot assign it a nonlinguistic 

point of departure, it is because language does not operate between some-

thing seen (or felt) and something said, but always goes from saying to say-

ing. We believe that narrative consists not in communicating what one has 

seen but in transmitting what one has heard, what someone else said to 

you. Hearsay. It does not even suffice to invoke a vision distorted by pas-

sion. The "first" language, or rather the first determination of language, is

 

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not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse. The importance some 

have accorded metaphor and metonymy proves disastrous for the study of 

language. Metaphors and metonymies are merely effects; they are a part of 

language only when they presuppose indirect discourse. There are many 

passions in a passion, all manner of voices in a voice, murmurings, speak-

ing in tongues: that is why all discourse is indirect, and the translative 

movement proper to language is that of indirect discourse.

5

 Benveniste 

denies that the bee has language, even though it has an organic coding pro-

cess and even uses tropes. It has no language because it can communicate 

what it has seen but not transmit what has been communicated to it. A bee 

that has seen a food source can communicate the message to bees that did 

not see it, but a bee that has not seen it cannot transmit the message to oth-

ers that did not see it.

6

 Language is not content to go from a first party to a 

second party, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily 

goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen. It is in 

this sense that language is the transmission of the word as order-word, not 

the communication of a sign as information. Language is a map, not a trac-

ing. But how can the order-word be a function coextensive with language 

when the order, the command, seems tied to a restricted type of explicit 

proposition marked by the imperative?

 

Austin's famous theses clearly demonstrate that the various extrinsic 

relations between action and speech by which a statement can describe an 

action in an indicative mode or incite it in an imperative mode, etc., are not 

all there is. There are also intrinsic relations between speech and certain 

actions that are accomplished by sayingthem (the performative: I swear by 

saying "I swear"), and more generally between speech and certain actions 

that are accomplished in speaking (the illocutionary: I ask a question by 

saying "Is ... ?" I make a promise by saying "I love you ..."; I give a com-

mand by using the imperative, etc.). These acts internal to speech, these 

immanent relations between statements and acts, have been termed 
implicit or nondiscursive presuppositions, as opposed to the potentially 

explicit assumptions by which a statement refers to other statements or an 

external action (Ducrot). The theory of the performative sphere, and the 

broader sphere of the illocutionary, has had three important and immedi-

ate consequences: (1) It has made it impossible to conceive of language as a 

code, since a code is the condition of possibility for all explanation. It has 

also made it impossible to conceive of speech as the communication of 

information: to order, question, promise, or affirm is not to inform some-

one about a command, doubt, engagement, or assertion but to effectuate 

these specific, immanent, and necessarily implicit acts. (2) It has made it 

impossible to define semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics as scien-

tific zones of language independent of pragmatics. Pragmatics ceases to be

 

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a "trash heap," pragmatic determinations cease to be subject to the alterna-
tive: fall outside language, or answer to explicit conditions that syntacticize 
and semanticize pragmatic determinations. Instead, pragmatics becomes 
the presupposition behind all of the other dimensions and insinuates itself 
into everything. (3) It makes it impossible to maintain the distinction 
between language and speech because speech can no longer be defined sim-
ply as the extrinsic and individual use of a primary signification, or the var-
iable application of a preexisting syntax. Quite the opposite, the meaning 
and syntax of language can no longer be defined independently of the 
speech acts they presuppose.

7

 

It is true that it is still difficult to see how speech acts or implicit presup-

positions can be considered a function coextensive with language. It is all 
the more difficult if one starts with the performative (that which one does 
by saying it) and moves by extension to the illocutionary (that which one 
does in speaking). For it is always possible to thwart that move. The 
performative can be walled in by explaining it by specific syntactic and 
semantic characteristics avoiding any recourse to a generalized prag-
matics. According to Benveniste, for example, the performative relates not 
to acts but instead to a property ofself-referentiality of terms (the true per-
sonal pronouns, I, YOU..., defined as shifters). By this account, a 
preexistent structure of subjectivity, or intersubjectivity, in language, 
rather than presupposing speech acts, is adequate to account for them.

Benveniste thus defines language as communicational rather than infor-
mational; this properly linguistic intersubjectivity, or subjectification, 
explains all the rest, in other words, everything that is brought into being by 
saying it. The question is whether subjective communication is any better a 
linguistic notion than ideal information. Oswald Ducrot has set forth the 
reasons that have led him to reverse Benveniste's schema: The phenome-
non of self-referentiality cannot account for the performative. The oppo-
site is the case; it is "the fact that certain statements are socially devoted to 
the accomplishment of certain actions" that explains self-referentiality. 
The performative itself is explained by the illocutionary, not the opposite. 
It is the illocutionary that constitutes the nondiscursive or implicit presup-
positions. And the illocutionary is in turn explained by collective assem-
blages of enunciation, by juridical acts or equivalents of juridical acts, 
which, far from depending on subjectification proceedings or assignations 
of subjects in language, in fact determine their distribution. Communica-
tion is no better a concept than information; intersubjectivity gets us no 
further than signifiance in accounting for these "statements-acts" assem-
blages that in each language delimit the role and range of subjective mor-
phemes.

9

 (We will see that the analysis of indirect discourse confirms this

 

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point of view since it shows that subjectifications are not primary but 

result from a complex assemblage.)

 

We call order-words, not a particular category of explicit statements (for 

example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word or every state-

ment to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are, 

and can only be, accomplished in the statement. Order-words do not con-

cern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a "social 

obligation." Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly. Ques-

tions, promises, are order-words. The only possible definition of language 

is the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech acts cur-

rent in a language at a given moment.

 

The relation between the statement and the act is internal, immanent, 

but it is not one of identity. Rather, it is a relation of redundancy. The 

order-word itself is the redundancy of the act and the statement. 

Newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we 

"must" think, retain, expect, etc. Language is neither informational nor 

communica-tional. It is not the communication of information but 

something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from 

one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each 

statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the 

statement. The most general schema of information science posits in 

principle an ideal state of maximum information and makes redundancy 

merely a limitative condition serving to decrease this theoretical 

maximum in order to prevent it from being drowned out by noise. We 

are saying that the redundancy of the order-word is instead primary and 

that information is only the minimal condition for the transmission of 

order-words (which is why the opposition to be made is not between noise 

and information but between all the indisciplines at work in language, 

and the order-word as discipline or "grammaticality"). Redundancy has 

two forms, frequency and resonance; the first concerns the signifiance of 

information, the second (I = I) concerns the subjectivity of 

communication. It becomes apparent that information and 

communication, and even signifiance and subjectification, are subordinate 

to redundancy. A distinction is sometimes made between information 

and communication; some authors envision an abstract signifiance of 

information and an abstract subjectification of communication. None of 

this, however, yields an implicit or primary form of language. There is no 

signifiance independent of dominant significations, nor is there 

subjectification independent of an established order of subjection. Both 

depend on the nature and transmission of order-words in a given social 

field.

 

There is no individual enunciation. There is not even a subject of enun-

ciation. Yet relatively few linguists have analyzed the necessarily social

 

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character of enunciation.' ° The problem is that it is not enough to establish 

that enunciation has this social character, since it could be extrinsic; there-

fore too much or too little is said about it. The social character of enuncia-

tion is intrinsically founded only if one succeeds in demonstrating how 

enunciation in itself implies collective assemblages. It then becomes clear 

that the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified, only to 

the extent that an impersonal collective assemblage requires it and deter-

mines it to be so. It is for this reason that indirect discourse, especially 
"free" indirect discourse, 
is of exemplary value: there are no clear, distinc-

tive contours; what comes first is not an insertion of variously individ-

uated statements, or an interlocking of different subjects of enunciation, 

but a collective assemblage resulting in the determination of relative 

subjectification proceedings, or assignations of individuality and their 

shifting distributions within discourse. Indirect discourse is not explained 

by the distinction between subjects; rather, it is the assemblage, as it freely 

appears in this discourse, that explains all the voices present within a single 

voice, the glimmer of girls in a monologue by Charlus, the languages in a 

language, the order-words in a word. The American murderer "Son of 

Sam" killed on the prompting of an ancestral voice, itself transmitted 

through the voice of a dog. The notion of collective assemblage of enuncia-

tion takes on primary importance since it is what must account for the 

social character. We can no doubt define the collective assemblage as the 

redundant complex of the act and the statement that necessarily accom-

plishes it. But this is still only a nominal definition; it does not even enable 

us to justify our previous position that redundancy is irreducible to a sim-

ple identity (or that there is no simple identity between the statement and 

the act). If we wish to move to a real definition of the collective assemblage, 

we must ask of what consist these acts immanent to language that are in 

redundancy with statements or constitute order-words.

 

These acts seem to be defined as the set of all incorporeal transforma-

tions current in a given society and attributed to the bodies of that society. 

We may take the word "body" in its broadest sense (there are mental bod-

ies, souls are bodies, etc.). We must, however, distinguish between the 

actions and passions affecting those bodies, and acts, which are only 

noncorporeal attributes or the "expressed" of a statement. When Ducrot 

asks what an act consists of, he turns precisely to the juridical assemblage, 

taking the example of the judge's sentence that transforms the accused into 

a convict. In effect, what takes place beforehand (the crime of which some-

one is accused), and what takes place after (the carrying out of the penalty), 

are actions-passions affecting bodies (the body of the property, the body of 

the victim, the body of the convict, the body of the prison); but the transfor-

mation of the accused into a convict is a pure instantaneous act or incorpo-

 

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real attribute that is the expressed of the judge's sentence.

11

 Peace and war 

are states or interminglings of very different kinds of bodies, but the decla-

ration of a general mobilization expresses an instantaneous and incorpo-

real transformation of bodies. Bodies have an age, they mature and grow 

old; but majority, retirement, any given age category, are incorporeal trans-

formations that are immediately attributed to bodies in particular socie-

ties. "You are no longer a child": this statement concerns an incorporeal 

transformation, even if it applies to bodies and inserts itself into their 

actions and passions. The incorporeal transformation is recognizable by 

its instantaneousness, its immediacy, by the simultaneity of the statement 

expressing the transformation and the effect the transformation produces; 

that is why order-words are precisely dated, to the hour, minute, and sec-

ond, and take effect the moment they are dated. Love is an intermingling of 

bodies that can be represented by a heart with an arrow through it, by a 

union of souls, etc., but the declaration "I love you" expresses a 

noncor-poreal attribute of bodies, the lover's as well as that of the loved one. 

Eating bread and drinking wine are interminglings of bodies; communing 

with Christ is also an intermingling of bodies, properly spiritual bodies 

that are no less "real" for being spiritual. But the transformation of the 

body of the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ is the 

pure expressed of a statement attributed to the bodies. In an airplane 

hijacking, the threat of a hijacker brandishing a revolver is obviously an 

action; so is the execution of the hostages, if it occurs. But the 

transformation of the passengers into hostages, and of the plane-body 

into a prison-body, is an instantaneous incorporeal transformation, a 

"mass media act" in the sense in which the English speak of "speech 

acts." The order-words or assemblages of enunciation in a given society 

(in short, the illocutionary) designate this instantaneous relation between 

statements and the incorporeal transformations or noncorporeal attributes 

they express.

 

The instantaneousness of the order-word, which can be projected to 

infinity, placed at the origin of society, is quite strange; for Rousseau, for 

example, the passage from the state of nature to the social state is like a leap 

in place, an incorporeal transformation occurring at zero hour. Real his-

tory undoubtedly recounts the actions and passions of the bodies that 

develop in a social field; it communicates them in a certain fashion; but it 

also transmits order-words, in other words, pure acts intercalated into that 

development. History will never be rid of dates. Perhaps economics or 

financial analysis best demonstrates the presence and instantaneousness 

of these decisive acts in an overall process (that is why statements defi-

nitely do not belong to ideology, but are already at work in what is suppos-

edly the domain of the economic base). The galloping inflation in 

Germany after 1918 was a crisis affecting the monetary body, and many

 

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other bodies besides; but the sum of the "circumstances" suddenly made 

possible a semiotic transformation that, although indexed to the body of 

the earth and material assets, was still a pure act or incorporeal trans-

formation—November 20, 1923.. .'

2

 

The assemblages are in constant variation, are themselves constantly 

subject to transformations. First, the circumstances must be taken into 

account: Benveniste clearly demonstrates that a performative statement is 

nothing outside of the circumstances that make it performative. Anybody 

can shout, "I declare a general mobilization," but in the absence of an effec-

tuated variable giving that person the right to make such a statement it is an 

act of peurility or insanity, not an act of enunciation. This is also true of "I 

love you," which has neither meaning nor subject nor addressee outside of 

circumstances that not only give it credibility but make it a veritable 

assemblage, a power marker, even in the case of an unhappy love (it is still 

by a will to power that one obeys...). The general term "circumstances" 

should not leave the impression that it is a question only of external cir-

cumstances. "I swear" is not the same when said in the family, at school, in 

a love affair, in a secret society, or in court: it is not the same thing, and nei-

ther is it the same statement; it is not the same bodily situation, and neither 

is it the same incorporeal transformation. The transformation applies to 

bodies but is itself incorporeal, internal to enunciation. There are variables 

of expression that establish a relation between language and the outside, but 
precisely because they are immanent to language. 
As long as linguistics 

confines itself to constants, whether syntactical, morphological, or pho-

nological, it ties the statement to a signifier and enunciation to a subject 

and accordingly botches the assemblage; it consigns circumstances to the 

exterior, closes language in on itself, and makes pragmatics a residue. Prag-

matics, on the other hand, does not simply appeal to external circum-

stances: it brings to light variables of expression or of enunciation that are 

so many internal reasons for language not to close itself off. As Volosinov 

[Bakhtin] says, as long as linguistics extracts constants, it is incapable of help-

ing us understand how a single word can be a complete enunciation; there 

must be "an extra something" that "remains outside of the scope of the entire 

set of linguistic categories and definitions," even though it is still entirely 

within the purview of the theory of enunciation or language.'

3

 The order-word 

is precisely that variable that makes the word as such an enunciation. The 

instantaneousness of the order-word, its immediacy, gives it a power of varia-

tion in relation to the bodies to which the transformation is attributed.

 

Pragmatics is a politics of language. A study such as Jean-Pierre Faye's 

on the constitution of Nazi statements in the German social field is in this 

respect exemplary (and cannot be directly transferred to the constitution 

of Fascist statements in Italy). Transformational research of this kind is

 

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concerned with the variation of the order-words and noncorporeal attri-

butes linked to social bodies and effectuating immanent acts. We may take 

as another example, under different conditions, the formation of a prop-

erly Leninist type of statement in Soviet Russia, basing ourselves on a text 

by Lenin entitled "On Slogans" (1917). This text constituted an incorpo-

real transformation that extracted from the masses a proletarian class as an 

assemblage of enunciation before the conditions were present for the prole-

tariat to exist as a body. A stroke of genius from the First Marxist Interna-

tional, which "invented" a new type of class: Workers of the world, unite!

14 

Taking advantage of the break with the Social Democrats, Lenin invented 

or decreed yet another incorporeal transformation that extracted from the 

proletarian class a vanguard as an assemblage of enunciation and was 

attributed to the "Party," a new type of party as a distinct body, at the risk of 

falling into a properly bureaucratic system of redundancy. The Leninist 

wager, an act of audacity? Lenin declared that the slogan {mot d'ordre) "All 

power to the Soviets" was valid only from the 27th of February to the 4th of 

July for the peacetime development of the Revolution, and no longer held 

in the state of war; the passage from peace to war implied this transforma-

tion, not just from the masses to a guiding proletariat, but from the prole-

tariat to a directing vanguard. July 4 exactly the power of the Soviets came 

to an end. All of the external circumstances can be assigned: the war as well 

as the insurrection that forced Lenin to flee to Finland. But the fact 

remains that the incorporeal transformation was uttered on the 4th of July, 

prior to the organization of the body to which it would be attributed, 

namely, the Party itself. "Every particular slogan must be deduced from the 

totality of the specific features of a definite political situation."

15

 If the 

objection is leveled that these specific features pertain to politics and not 

linguistics, it must be observed how thoroughly politics works language 

from within, causing not only the vocabulary but also the structure and all 

of the phrasal elements to vary as the order-words change. A type of state-

ment can be evaluated only as a function of its pragmatic implications, in 

other words, in relation to the implicit presuppositions, immanent acts, or 

incorporeal transformations it expresses and which introduce new config-

urations of bodies. True intuition is not a judgment of grammaticality but 

an evaluation of internal variables of enunciation in relation to the aggre-

gate of the circumstances.

 

We have gone from explicit commands to order-words as implicit pre-

suppositions; from order-words to the immanent acts or incorporeal trans-

formations they express; and from there to the assemblages of enunciation 

whose variables they are. To the extent these variables enter at a given 

moment into determinable relations, the assemblages combine in a regime 
of signs or a semiotic machine. 
It is obvious that a society is plied by several

 

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semiotics, that its regimes are in fact mixed. Moreover, at a later time there 

will arise new order-words that will modify the variables and will not yet be 

part of a known regime. Thus the order-word is redundancy in several 

ways: as a function of the process of transmission essential to it, and in 

itself, from the time it is emitted, in its "immediate" relation with the act or 

transformation it effectuates. The order-word is already redundancy even 

when it is in rupture with a particular semiotic. That is why every state-

ment of a collective assemblage of enunciation belongs to indirect dis-

course. Indirect discourse is the presence of a reported statement within 

the reporting statement, the presence of an order-word within the word. 

Language in its entirety is indirect discourse. Indirect discourse in no way 

supposes direct discourse; rather, the latter is extracted from the former, to 

the extent that the operations of signifiance and proceedings of 

subjec-tification in an assemblage are distributed, attributed, and 

assigned, or that the variables of the assemblage enter into constant 

relations, however temporarily. Direct discourse is a detached fragment of 

a mass and is born of the dismemberment of the collective assemblage; 

but the collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take 

my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which 

I draw my voice. I always depend on a molecular assemblage of 

enunciation that is not given in my conscious mind, any more than it 

depends solely on my apparent social determinations, which combine 

many heterogeneous regimes of signs. Speaking in tongues. To write is 

perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to 

select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from 

which I extract something I call my Self (Moi). I is an order-word. A 

schizophrenic said: "I heard voices say: he is conscious of life."

16

  In this 

sense, there is indeed a schizophrenic cogito, but it is a cogito that makes 

self-consciousness the incorporeal transformation of an order-word, or a 

result of indirect discourse. My direct discourse is still the free indirect 

discourse running through me, coming from other worlds or other planets. 

That is why so many artists and writers have been tempted by the seance 

table. When we ask what faculty is specific to the order-word, we must 

indeed attribute to it some strange characteristics: a kind of 

instantaneousness in the emission, perception, and transmission of 

order-words; a wide variability, and a power of forgetting permitting one to 

feel absolved of the order-words one has followed and then abandoned in 

order to welcome others; a properly ideal or ghostly capacity for the appre-

hension of incorporeal transformations; an aptitude for grasping language 

as an immense indirect discourse.'

7

 The faculty of the cuer and the cued, of 

the song that always holds a tune within a tune in a relation of redundancy; 

a faculty that is in truth mediumistic, glossolalic, or xenoglossic.

 

Let us return to the question of how this defines a language-function, a

 

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function coextensive with language. It is evident that order-words, collec-

tive assemblages, or regimes of signs cannot be equated with language. But 

they effectuate its condition of possibility {the superlinearity of expres-
sion),  
they fulfill in each instance this condition of possibility; without 

them, language would remain a pure virtuality (the superlinear character 

of indirect discourse). Doubtless, the assemblages vary, undergo transfor-

mation. But they do not necessarily vary by language, they do not corre-

spond to the various languages. A language seems to be defined by the 

syntactical, semantic, phonological constants in its statements; the collec-

tive assemblage, on the contrary, concerns the usage of these constants in 

relation to variables internal to enunciation itself (variables of expression, 

immanent acts, or incorporeal transformations). Different constants, dif-

ferent languages, may have the same usage; the same constants in a given 

language may have different usages, successively or even simultaneously. 

We cannot content ourselves with a duality between constants as linguistic 

factors that are explicit or potentially explicit, and variables as extrinsic, 

nonlinguistic factors. For the pragmatic variables of usage are internal to 

enunciation and constitute the implicit presuppositions of language. Thus 

if the collective assemblage is in each instance coextensive with the linguis-

tic system considered, and to language as a whole, it is because it expresses 

the set of incorporeal transformations that effectuate the condition of pos-

sibility of language and utilize the elements of the linguistic system. The 

language-function thus defined is neither informational nor 

communi-cational; it has to do neither with signifying information nor 

with intersubjective communication. And it is useless to abstract a 

signifiance outside information, or a subjectivity outside communication. 

For the subjectification proceedings and movement of signifiance relate 

to regimes of signs, or collective assemblages. The language-function is 

the transmission of order-words, and order-words relate to assemblages, 

just as assemblages relate to the incorporeal transformations constituting 

the variables of the function. Linguistics is nothing without a pragmatics 

(semiotic or political) to define the effectuation of the condition of possibil-
ity 
of language and the usage of linguistic elements.

 

II. "There Is an Abstract Machine of Language That 

Does Not Appeal to Any 'Extrinsic' Factor"

 

If in a social field we distinguish the set of corporeal modifications and the 

set of incorporeal transformations, we are presented, despite the variety in 

each of the sets, with two formalizations, one of content,  the other of 
expression.  For content is not opposed to form but has its own formal-

ization: the hand-tool pole, or the lesson of things. It is, however, opposed

 

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to expression, inasmuch as expression also has its own formalization: the 

face-language pole, the lesson of signs. Precisely because content, like 

expression, has a form of its own, one can never assign the form of expres-

sion the function of simply representing, describing, or averring a corre-

sponding content: there is neither correspondence nor conformity. The 

two formalizations are not of the same nature; they are independent, heter-

ogeneous. The Stoics were the first to theorize this independence: they dis-

tinguished between the actions and passions of bodies (using the word 

"body" in the broadest sense, as applying to any formed content) and 

incorporeal acts (the "expressed" of the statements). The form of expres-

sion is constituted by the warp of expresseds, and the form of content by the 

woof of bodies. When knife cuts flesh, when food or poison spreads 

through the body, when a drop of wine falls into water, there is an intermin-
gling of bodies; 
but the statements, "The knife is cutting the flesh," "I am 

eating," "The water is turning red," express incorporeal transformations of 

an entirely different nature (events).

18

 The genius of the Stoics was to have 

taken this paradox as far as it could go, up to the point of insanity and cyni-

cism, and to have grounded it in the most serious of principles: their reward 

was to be the first to develop a philosophy of language.

 

The paradox gets us nowhere unless, like the Stoics, we add that incorpo-

real transformations, incorporeal attributes, apply to bodies, and only to 

bodies. They are the expressed of statements but are attributed to bodies. 

The purpose is not to describe or represent bodies; bodies already have 

proper qualities, actions and passions, souls, in short forms, which are 

themselves bodies. Representations are bodies too! If noncorporeal attri-

butes apply to bodies, if there are good grounds for making a distinction 

between the incorporeal expressed "to become red" and the corporeal 

quality "red," etc., it has nothing to with representation. We cannot even 

say that the body or state of things is the "referent" of the sign. In expressing 

the noncorporeal attribute, and by that token attributing it to the body, one 

is not representing or referring but intervening in a way; it is a speech act. 

The independence of the two kinds of forms, forms of expression and 

forms of content, is not contradicted but confirmed by the fact that the 

expressions or expresseds are inserted into or intervene in contents, not to 

represent them but to anticipate them or move them back, slow them down 

or speed them up, separate or combine them, delimit them in a different 

way. The warp of the instantaneous transformations is always inserted into 

the woof of the continuous modifications. (Hence the significance of dates 

for the Stoics. From what moment can it be said that someone is bald? In 

what sense does a statement of the type "There will be a naval battle tomor-

row" constitute a date or order-word?) The night of August 4, July 4,1917, 

November 20, 1923: What incorporeal transformation is expressed by

 

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these dates, incorporeal yet attributed to bodies, inserted into them? The 

independence of the form of expression and the form of content is not the 

basis for a parallelism between them or a representation of one by the other, 

but on the contrary a parceling of the two, a manner in which expressions 

are inserted into contents, in which we ceaselessly jump from one register 

to another, in which signs are at work in things themselves just as things 

extend into or are deployed through signs. An assemblage of enunciation 

does not speak "of" things; it speaks on the same level as states of things and 

states of content. So that the same x, the same particle, may function either 

as a body that acts and undergoes actions or as a sign constituting an act or 

order-word, depending on which form it is taken up by (for example, the 

theoretico-experimental aggregate of physics). In short, the functional in-

dependence of the two forms is only the form of their reciprocal presup-

position, and of the continual passage from one to the other. We are never 

presented with an interlinkage of order-words and a causality of contents 

each in its own right; nor do we see one represent the other, with the second 

serving as referent. On the contrary, the independence of the two lines is 

distributive, such that a segment of one always forms a relay with a segment 

of the other, slips into, introduces itself into the other. We constantly pass 

from order-words to the "silent order" of things, as Foucault puts it, and 

vice versa.

 

But when we use a word as vague as "intervene," when we say that 

expressions intervene or insert themselves into contents, are we not still 

prey to a kind of idealism in which the order-word instantaneously falls 

from the sky? What we must determine is not an origin but points of inter-

vention or insertion in the framework of the reciprocal presupposition of 

the two forms. Both forms of content and forms of expression are insepara-

ble from a movement of deterritorialization that carries them away. Both 

expression and content are more or less deterritorialized, relatively 

deterritorialized, according to the particular state of their form. In this 

respect, one cannot posit a primacy of expression over content, or content 

over expression. Sometimes the semiotic components are more deter-

ritorialized than the material components, and sometimes the reverse. For 

example, a mathematical complex of signs may be more deterritorialized 

than a set of particles; conversely, the particles may have experimental 

effects that deterritorialize the semiotic system. A criminal action may be 

deterritorializing in relation to the existing regime of signs (the earth cries 

for revenge and crumbles beneath my feet, my offense is too great); but the 

sign that expresses the act of condemnation may in turn be deter-

ritorializing in relation to all actions and reactions ("a fugitive and a 

vagabond shalt thou be in the earth" [Gen. 4:12], you cannot even be 

killed). In short, there are degrees of deterritorialization that quantify the

 

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respective forms and according to which contents and expression are 

conjugated, feed into each other, accelerate each other, or on the contrary 

become stabilized and perform a reterritorialization. What we call circum-

stances or variables are these degrees themselves. There are variables of 
content, 
or proportions in the interminglings or aggregations of bodies, and 

there are variables of expression, factors internal to enunciation. Germany, 

toward November 20, 1923: on the one hand, the deterritorializing infla-

tion of the monetary body and, on the other, in response to the inflation, a 

semiotic transformation of the reichsmark into the rentenmark, making 

possible a reterritorialization. Russia, toward July 4,1917: on the one hand 

proportions of a state of "bodies" Soviets-provisional government, and on 

the other the elaboration of a Bolshevik incorporeal semiotic, accelerating 

things and contributing to the action of the detonating body of the Party. In 

short, the way an expression relates to a content is not by uncovering or rep-

resenting it. Rather, forms of expression and forms of content communi-

cate through a conjunction of their quanta of relative deterritorialization, 

each intervening, operating in the other.

 

We may draw some general conclusions on the nature of Assemblages 

from this. On a first, horizontal, axis, an assemblage comprises two seg-

ments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a 
machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling 

of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assem-
blage of enunciation, 
of acts and statements, of incorporeal transforma-

tions attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both 
territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting 
edges of deterritorialization, 
which carry it away. No one is better than 

Kafka at differentiating the two axes of the assemblage and making them 

function together. On the one hand, the ship-machine, the hotel-machine, 

the circus-machine, the castle-machine, the court-machine, each with its 

own intermingled pieces, gears, processes, and bodies contained in one 

another or bursting out of containment (see the head bursting through the 

roof)

19

 On the other hand, the regime of signs or of enunciation: each 

regime with its incorporeal transformations, acts, death sentences and 

judgments, proceedings, "law." It is obvious that statements do not repre-

sent machines: the Stoker's discourse does not describe stoking as a body; it 

has its own form, and a development without resemblance.

20

 Yet it is 

attributed to bodies, to the whole ship as a body. A discourse of submission 

to order-words; a discourse of discussion, claims, accusation, and defense. 

On the second axis, what is compared or combined of the two aspects, what 

always inserts one into the other, are the sequenced or conjugated degrees 

of deterritorialization, and the operations of reterritorialization that stabi-

lize the aggregate at a given moment. K., the K.-function, designates the

 

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line of flight or deterritorialization that carries away all of the assemblages 

but also undergoes all kinds of reterritorializations and redundancies— 

redundancies of childhood, village-life, love, bureaucracy, etc.

 

The tetravalence of the assemblage. Taking the feudal assemblage as an 

example, we would have to consider the interminglings of bodies defining 

feudalism: the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the over-

lord, vassal, and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new 

relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of 

bodies—a whole machinic assemblage. We would also have to consider 

statements, expressions, the juridical regime of heraldry, all of the incorpo-

real transformations, in particular, oaths and their variables (the oath of 

obedience, but also the oath of love, etc.): the collective assemblage of 

enunciation. On the other axis, we would have to consider the feudal 

territorialities and reterritorializations, and at the same time the line of 

deterritorialization that carries away both the knight and his mount, state-

ments and acts. We would have to consider how all this combines in the 

Crusades.

 

It would be an error to believe that content determines expression by 

causal action, even if expression is accorded the power not only to "reflect" 

content but to react upon it in an active way. This kind of ideological con-

ception of the statement, which subordinates it to a primary economic con-

tent, runs into all kinds of difficulties inherent to dialectics. First, although 

it may be possible to conceive of a causal action moving from content to 

expression, the same cannot be said for the respective forms, the form of 

content and the form of expression. We must recognize that expression is 

independent and that this is precisely what enables it to react upon con-

tents. This independence, however, has been poorly conceived. If contents 

are said to be economic, the form of content cannot be said to be economic 

and is reduced to a pure abstraction, namely, the production of goods and 

the means of that production considered in themselves. Similarly, if ex-

pressions are said to be ideological, the form of expression is not said to be 

ideological and is reduced to language as abstraction, as the availability of a 

good shared by all. Those who take this approach claim to characterize 

contents and expressions by all the struggles and conflicts pervading them 

in two different forms, but these forms themselves are exempt from strug-

gle and conflict, and the relation between them remains entirely indeter-

minate.

21

 The only way to define the relation is to revamp the theory of 

ideology by saying that expressions and statements intervene directly in 

productivity, in the form of a production of meaning or sign-value. The 

category of production doubtless has the advantage of breaking with 

schemas of representation, information, and communication. But is it any 

more adequate than these schemas? Its application to language is very

 

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ambiguous in that it appeals to an ongoing dialectical miracle of the 

transformation of matter into meaning, content into expression, the social 

process into a signifying system.

 

We think the material or machinic aspect of an assemblage relates not to 

the production of goods but rather to a precise state of intermingling of 

bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies 

and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions 

that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another. What 

regulates the obligatory, necessary, or permitted interminglings of bodies 

is above all an alimentary regime and a sexual regime. Even technology 

makes the mistake of considering tools in isolation: tools exist only in rela-

tion to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible. 

The stirrup entails a new man-horse symbiosis that at the same time entails 

new weapons and new instruments. Tools are inseparable from symbioses 

or amalgamations defining a Nature-Society machinic assemblage. They 

presuppose a social machine that selects them and takes them into its "phy-

lum": a society is defined by its amalgamations, not by its tools. Similarly, 

the semiotic or collective aspect of an assemblage relates not to a produc-

tivity of language but to regimes of signs, to a machine of expression whose 

variables determine the usage of language elements. These elements do not 

stand on their own any more than tools do. There is a primacy of the 

machinic assemblage of bodies over tools and goods, a primacy of the col-

lective assemblage of enunciation over language and words. The articula-

tion of the two aspects of the assemblage is effected by the movements of 

deterritorialization that quantify their forms. That is why a social field is 

defined less by its conflicts and contradictions than by the lines of flight 

running through it. An assemblage has neither base nor superstructure, 

neither deep structure nor superficial structure; it flattens all of its dimen-

sions onto a single plane of consistency upon which reciprocal presupposi-

tions and mutual insertions play themselves out.

 

The other mistake (which is combined with the first as needed) is to 

believe in the adequacy of the form of expression as a linguistic system. 

This system may be conceived as a signifying phonological structure, or as 

a deep syntactical structure. In either case, it is credited with engendering 

semantics, therefore of fulfilling expression, whereas contents are rele-

gated to the arbitrariness of a simple "reference" and pragmatics to the 

exteriority of nonlinguistic factors. What all of these undertakings have in 

common is to erect an abstract machine of language, but as a synchronic set 

of constants. We will not object that the machine thus conceived is too 

abstract. On the contrary, it is not abstract enough, it remains "linear." It 

remains on an intermediate level of abstraction allowing it to consider lin-

guistic factors in themselves, independently of nonlinguistic factors, and

 

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to treat those linguistic factors as constants. But if the abstraction is taken 
further, one necessarily reaches a level where the pseudoconstants of lan-
guage are superseded by variables of expression internal to enunciation 
itself; these variables of expression are then no longer separable from the 
variables of content with which they are in perpetual interaction. If the 
external pragmatics of nonlinguistic factors must be taken into considera-
tion, it is because linguistics itself is inseparable from an internal prag-
matics involving its own factors. 
It is not enough to take into account the 
signified, or even the referent, because the very notions of signification 
and reference are bound up with a supposedly autonomous and constant 
structure. There is no use constructing a semantics, or even recognizing a 
certain validity to pragmatics, if they are still pretreated by a phonological 
or syntactical machine. For a true abstract machine pertains to an assem-
blage in its entirety: it is defined as the diagram of that assemblage. It is not 
language based but diagrammatic and superlinear. Content is not a signi-
fied nor expression a signifier; rather, both are variables of the assemblage. 
We get nowhere until the pragmatic, but also semantic, syntactical, and 
phonological determinations are directly linked to the assemblages of 
enunciation upon which they depend. Chomsky's abstract machine retains 
an arborescent model and a linear ordering of linguistic elements in sen-
tences and sentence combinations. But as soon as pragmatic values or 
internal variables are taken into account, in particular with respect to indi-
rect discourse, one is obliged to bring "hypersentences" into play or to con-
struct "abstract objects" (incorporeal transformations). This implies 
superlinearity, in other words, a plane whose elements no longer have a 
fixed linear order: the rhizome model.

22

 From this standpoint, the 

inter-penetration of language and the social field and political problems 
lies at the deepest level of the abstract machine, not at the surface. The 
abstract machine as it relates to the diagram of the assemblage is never 
purely a matter of language, except for lack of sufficient abstraction. It is 
language that depends on the abstract machine, not the reverse. At most, 
we may distinguish in the abstract machine two states of the diagram, 
one in which variables of content and expression are distributed according 
to their heterogeneous forms in reciprocal presupposition on a plane of 
consistency, and another in which it is no longer even possible to 
distinguish between variables of content and expression because the 
variability of that same plane has prevailed over the duality of forms, 
rendering them "indiscernible." (The first state relates to still relative 
movements of deterritori-alization; in the second, an absolute threshold 
of deterritorialization has been reached.)

 

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III. "There Are Constants or Universals of Language That Enable Us to 

Define It as a Homogeneous System"

 

The question of structural invariants—and the very idea of structure is 

inseparable from invariants, whether atomic or relational—is essential to 

linguistics. It is what allows linguistics to claim a basis in pure scientificity, 

to be nothing but science ... safe from any supposedly external or prag-

matic factor. The question of invariants assumes several closely connected 

forms: (1) the constants of a language (phonological, by commutativity; 

syntactical, by transformativity; semantic, by generativity); (2) the uni-

versals of language (by decomposition of the phoneme into distinctive 

features; of syntax into fundamental constituents; of signification into 

minimal semantic elements); (3) trees linking constants to one another, 

with binary relations between trees (see Chomsky's linear arborescent 

method); (4) competence, in principle coextensive with language and 

defined by judgments of grammaticality; (5) homogeneity, bearing on ele-

ments and relations as well as intuitive judgments; (6) synchrony, which 

erects an "in-itself' and a "for-itself' of language, perpetually moving from 

the objective system to the subjective consciousness that apprehends its 

principle (that of the linguist himself or herself).

 

One can juggle all of these factors, subtract some or even add new ones. 

They go together, however, because the essentials of all of them are present 

on the level of any one. For example, the distinction between speech and 

language is recapitulated in the distinction between competence and per-

formance, but at the level of grammaticality. If it is objected that the dis-

tinction between competence and performance is entirely relative (a 

linguistic competence can be economic, religious, political, or aesthetic, 

etc.; the teaching competence of a grade school teacher may be only a per-

formance in relation to the judgment of an inspector or government regula-

tions), linguists respond that they are willing to multiply levels of 

competence, and even to introduce pragmatic values into the system. 

Brekle, for example, proposes adding an "idiosyncratic performatory com-

petence" factor tied to a whole constellation of linguistic, psychological, or 

sociological factors. But what use is this injection of pragmatics if 

pragmatics is in turn considered to have constants or universals of its own? 

And in what way are expressions like "I," "promise," "know" more univer-

sal than "greet," "name," or "condemn"?

23

 Similarly, when efforts are 

made to make Chomsky's trees bud and to shatter linear order, as long as 

the pragmatic components marking the ruptures are placed above the tree 

or effaced from the derivation nothing has really been accomplished, one 

has failed to constitute a rhizome.

24

 In truth, the nature of the abstract 

machine is the most general problem: there is no reason to tie the abstract

 

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to the universal or the constant, or to efface the singularity of abstract 
machines insofar as they are built around variables and variations.

 

The debate between Chomsky and Labov will give us a better under-

standing of what the issue is. Every language is an essentially heterogene-
ous reality; linguists know this and say so. But this is a factual remark. 
Chomsky asks only that one carve from this aggregate a homogeneous or 
standard system as a basis for abstraction or idealization, making possible 
a scientific study of principles. Limiting oneself to standard English is thus 
not the issue, for even a linguist who studies Black English or the English of 
the ghettos is obliged to extract a standard system guaranteeing the con-
stancy and homogeneity of the object under study (no science can operate 
any other way, they say). Thus Chomsky pretends to believe that by assert-
ing his interest in the variable features of language, Labov is situating him-
self in a de facto pragmatics external to linguistics.

25

 Labov, however, has 

other ambitions. When he brings to light lines of inherent variation, he does 
not see them simply as "free variants" pertaining to pronunciation, style, 
or nonpertinent features that lie outside the system and leave the homoge-
neity of the system intact; neither does he see them as a de facto mix 
between two systems, each homogeneous in its own right, as if the speaker 
moved from one to the other. He refuses the alternative linguistics set up 
for itself: assigning variants to different systems, or relegating them to a 
place outside the structure. It is the variation itself that is systematic, in the 
sense in which musicians say that "the theme is the variation." Labov sees 
variation as a de jure component affecting each system from within, send-
ing it cascading or leaping on its own power and forbidding one to close it 
off, to make it homogeneous in principle. Labov does consider variables of 
all kinds, phonetic, phonological, syntactical, semantic, stylistic. Yet it 
would seem difficult to accuse him of missing the distinction between the 
de jure and the de facto—or between linguistics and stylistics, or 
synchrony and diachrony, or pertinent and nonpertinent features, or com-
petence and performance, or the grammaticality of language and the 
agrammaticality of speech. Although this may be hardening his positions, 
we would say rather that Labov proposes a different distribution of the de 
facto and the de jure, and especially a different conception of the de jure 
itself and of abstraction. He takes the example of a young black person 
who, in a very short series of phrases, seems to pass from the Black English 
system to the standard system eighteen times. Is it not the abstract distinc-
tion between the two systems that proves arbitrary and insufficient? For 
the majority of the forms belongs to one or the other only by virtue of the 
fortuities of a given sequence. Must it not be admitted that every system is 
in variation and is defined not by its constants and homogeneity but on the

 

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contrary by a variability whose characteristics are immanent, continuous, and 

regulated in a very specific mode (variable or optional rules)?

25

 

How can we conceptualize this continuous variation at work within a 

language, even if it means overstepping the limits Labov sets for himself as 

well as the conditions of scientificity invoked by linguistics? In the course 

of a single day, an individual repeatedly passes from language to language. 

He successively speaks as "father to son" and as a boss; to his lover, he 

speaks an infantilized language; while sleeping he is plunged into an oniric 

discourse, then abruptly returns to a professional language when the tele-

phone rings. It will be objected that these variations are extrinsic, that it is 

still the same language. But that is to prejudge the question. First, it is not 

certain that the phonology is the same, nor the syntax, nor the semantics. 

Second, the whole question is whether this supposedly identical language 

is defined by invariants or, on the contrary, by the line of continuous varia-

tion running through it. Some linguists have suggested that linguistic 

change occurs less by systemic rupture than by a gradual modification of 

frequency, by a coexistence and continuity of different usages. Take as an 

example the statement, "I swear!" It is a different statement depending on 

whether it is said by a child to his or her father, by a man in love to his loved 

one, or by a witness before the court. These are like three sequences. (Or 

Messiaen's four "amen"s stretched over seven sequences.) Once again, 

there is no reason to say that the variables are merely situational, and that 

the statement remains constant in principle. Not only are there as many 

statements as there are effectuations, but all of the statements are present 

in the effectuation of one among them, so that the line of variation is vir-

tual, in other words, real without being actual, and consequently continu-

ous regardless of the leaps the statement makes. To place the statement in 

continuous variation is to send it through all the prosodic, semantic, syn-

tactical, and phonological variables that can affect it in the shortest 

moment of time (the smallest interval). Build the continuum of "I swear!" 

with the corresponding transformations. This is the standpoint of 

pragmatics, but a pragmatics internal to language, immanent, including 

variations of linguistic elements of all kinds. For example, Kafka's line of 

the three proceedings: the father's proceedings in the family; the engage-

ment proceedings at the hotel; and the court proceedings. There is a con-

stant tendency to seek a "reduction": everything is explained by the 

situation of the child in relation to its father, or of the man in relation to 

castration, or of the citizen in relation to the law. But this is to content one-

self with extracting a pseudoconstant of content, which is no better than 

extracting a pseudoconstant of expression. Placing-in-variation allows us 

to avoid these dangers, because it builds a continuum or medium without 

beginning or end. Continuous variation should not be confused with the

 

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continuous or discontinuous character of the variable itself: the 

order-word, a continuous variation for a discontinuous variable ... A 

variable can be continuous over a portion of its trajectory, then leap or skip, 

without that affecting its continuous variation; what this does is impose an 

absent development as an "alternative continuity" that is virtual yet real.

 

A constant or invariant is defined less by its permanence and duration 

than by its function as a center, if only relative. In the tonal or diatonic sys-

tem of music, laws of resonance and attraction determine centers valid for 

all modes and endowed with stability and attractive power (pouvoir). These 

centers therefore organize distinct, distinctive, forms that are clearly estab-

lished for a certain amount of time: a linear, codified, centered system of 

the arborescent type. It is true that the minor "mode" gives tonal music a 

decentered, runaway, fugitive character due to the nature of its intervals 

and the lesser stability of its chords. This mode thus has the ambiguity of 

undergoing operations that align it to a major model or standard at the 

same time as it continues to display a certain modal power (puissance) irre-

ducible to tonality, as though music set out on a journey and garnered all 

resurgences, phantoms of the Orient, imaginary lands, traditions from all 

over. But temperament, tempered chromaticism has an even greater ambi-

guity: stretching the action of the center to the most distant tones, but also 

preparing the disaggregation of the central principle, replacing the cen-

tered forms of continuous development with a form that constantly dis-

solves and transforms itself. When development subordinates form and 

spans the whole, as in Beethoven, variation begins to free itself and 

becomes identified with creation. But when chromaticism is unleashed, 

becomes a generalized chromaticism, turns back against temperament, 

affecting not only pitches but all sound components—durations, intensi-

ties, timbre, attacks—it becomes impossible to speak of a sound form 

organizing matter; it is no longer even possible to speak of a continuous 

development of form. Rather, it is a question of a highly complex and elab-

orate material making audible nonsonorous forces. The couple 

matter-form is replaced by the coupling material-forces. The synthesizer 

has taken the place of the old "a priori synthetic judgment," and all 

functions change accordingly. By placing all its components in continuous 

variation, music itself becomes a superlinear system, a rhizome instead of 

a tree, and enters the service of a virtual cosmic continuum of which even 

holes, silences, ruptures, and breaks are a part. Thus the important thing is 

certainly not to establish a pseudobreak between the tonal system and 

atonal music; the latter, on the contrary, in breaking away from the tonal 

system, only carried temperament to its ultimate conclusion (although no 

Viennese stopped there). The essential thing is almost the opposite 

movement: the ferment in the tonal system itself (during much of the 

nineteenth and twentieth cen-

 

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turies) that dissolved temperament and widened chromaticism while pre-

serving a relative tonality, which reinvented new modalities, brought a new 

amalgamation of major and minor, and in each instance conquered realms 

of continuous variation for this variable or that. This ferment came to the 

forefront and made itself heard in its own right; and, through the molecular 

material thus wrought, it made audible the nonsonorous forces of the 

cosmos that have always agitated music—a bit of Time in the pure state,

27

 a 

grain of absolute Intensity... The words "tonal," "modal," "atonal" do not 

mean much. Music is not alone in being art as cosmos and in drawing the 

virtual lines of an infinite variation.

 

Once again, the objection will be raised that music is not a language, that 

the components of sound are not pertinent features of language, that there 

is no correspondence between the two. We are not suggesting any corre-

spondence. We keep asking that the issue be left open, that any presup-

posed distinction be rejected. This especially applies to the 

language-speech distinction, which is used to relegate all kinds of 

variables at work within expression and enunciation to a position outside 

language. The Voice-Music relation proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 

on the other hand, could have taken not only phonetics and prosody but all 

of linguistics in a different direction. The voice in music has always been 

a privileged axis of experimentation, playing simultaneously on language 

and sound. Music has linked the voice to instruments in various ways; but 

as long as the voice is song, its main role is to "hold" sound, it functions as 

a constant circumscribed on a note and accompanied  by the instrument. 

Only when the voice is tied to timbre does it reveal a tessitura that 

renders it heterogeneous to itself and gives it a power of continuous 

variation: it is then no longer accompanied, but truly "machined," it 

belongs to a musical machine that prolongs or superposes on a single 

plane parts that are spoken, sung, achieved by special effects, instrumental, 

or perhaps electronically generated. This is the sound plane of a 

generalized "glissando" implying the constitution of a statistical space in 

which each variable has, not an average value, but a probability of 

frequency that places it in continuous variation with the other variables.

28

 

Luciano Berio's Visage  (Face) and Dieter Schnebel's Glossolalie 

(Speaking in tongues) are typical examples of this. And despite what Berio 

himself says, it is less a matter of using pseudoconstants to produce a 

simulacrum of language or a metaphor for the voice than of attaining that 

secret neuter language without constants and entirely in indirect discourse 

where the synthesizer and the instrument speak no less than the voice, and 

the voice plays no less than the instrument. It should not be thought that 

music has forgotten how to sing in a now mechanical and atomized 

world; rather, an immense coefficient of variation is affecting and carrying 

away all of the phatic, aphatic, linguistic,

 

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poetic, instrumental, or musical parts of a single sound assemblage—"a 

simple scream suffusing all degrees" (Thomas Mann). There are many pro-

cedures for placing the voice in variation, not only Sprechgesang 

(speech-song), which constantly leaves pitch behind by descent or ascent, 

but also circular breathing techniques and zones of resonance in which 

several voices seem to issue from the same mouth. Secret languages are 

very significant in this connection, in learned as well as popular music. 

Certain ethnomusicologists have found extraordinary cases (in Dahomey, 

for example) where a first, diatonic, vocal part is superseded by a 

chromatic descent into a secret language that slips from one sound to the 

next in a continuous fashion, modulating a sound continuum into smaller 

and smaller intervals until it becomes a "parlando" all of the intervals of 

which blur together—and then the diatonic part is itself transposed 

according to the chromatic levels of a terraced architecture, the song 

sometimes interrupted by a parlando, by a simple conversation lacking 

definite pitch.

29

 It is perhaps characteristic of secret languages, slangs, 

jargons, professional languages, nursery rhymes, merchants' cries to stand 

out less for their lexical inventions or rhetorical figures than for the way 

in which they effect continuous variations of the common elements of 

language. They are chromatic languages, close to a musical notation. A 

secret language does not merely have a hidden cipher or code still 

operating by constants and forming a subsystem; it places the public 
language's system of variables in a state ofvariation.

 

This is what we are getting at: a generalized chromaticism. Placing ele-

ments of any nature in continuous variation is an operation that will per-

haps give rise to new distinctions, but takes none as final and has none in 

advance. On the contrary, this operation in principle bears on the voice, 

speech, language, and music simultaneously. There is no reason to make 

prior, principled distinctions. Linguistics in general is still in a kind of 

major mode, still has a sort of diatonic scale and a strange taste for domi-

nants, constants, and universals. All languages, in the meantime, are in 

immanent continuous variation: neither synchrony nor diachrony, but 

asynchrony, chromaticism as a variable and continuous state of language. 

For a chromatic linguistics according pragmatism its intensities and 

values.

 

What is called a style can be the most natural thing in the world; it is 

nothing other than the procedure of a continuous variation. Of the dual-

isms established by linguistics, there are few with a more shaky foundation 

than the separation between linguistics and stylistics: Because a style is not 

an individual psychological creation but an assemblage of enunciation, it 

unavoidably produces a language within a language. Take an arbitrary list 

of authors we are fond of: Kafka once again, Beckett, Gherasim Luca, Jean-

 

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Luc Godard. It will be noted that they are all more or less in a bilingual situ-

ation: Kafka, the Czechoslovakian Jew writing in German; Beckett, the 

Irishman writing in English and French; Luca, originally from Romania; 

Godard and his will to be Swiss. But this is only circumstantial, an oppor-

tunity, and the opportunity can be found elsewhere. It will also be noted 

that many of them are not only or not primarily writers (Beckett and 

theater and television, Godard and film and television, Luca and his 

audiovisual machines). The reason for this is that when one submits lin-

guistic elements to a treatment producing continuous variation, when one 

introduces an internal pragmatics into language, one is necessarily led to 

treat nonlinguistic elements such as gestures and instruments in the same 

fashion, as if the two aspects of pragmatics joined on the same line of varia-

tion, in the same continuum. Moreover, the idea perhaps comes first from 

outside, with language following only later, as with the necessarily exterior 

sources of a style. But the essential thing is that each of these authors has his 

own procedure of variation, his own widened chromaticism, his own mad 

production of speeds and intervals. The creative stammering of Gherasim 

Luca, in the poem "Passionnement" (Passionately).

30

 Godard's is another 

kind of stammering. In theater: Robert Wilson's whispering, without defi-

nite pitch, and Carmelo Bene's ascending and descending variations.

31

 It's 

easy to stammer, but making language itself stammer is a different affair; it 

involves placing all linguistic, and even nonlinguistic, elements in varia-

tion, both variables of expression and variables of content. A new form of 

redundancy, 

AND 

... 

AND 

... 

AND 

... There has always been a struggle in 

language between the verb etre (to be) and the conjunction et (and) between 
est and et (is and and [which in French are identical in pronunciation— 

Trans.]) It is only in appearance that these two terms are in accord and 

combine, for the first acts in language as a constant and forms the diatonic 

scale of language, while the second places everything in variation, consti-

tuting the lines of a generalized chromaticism. From one to the other, 

everything shifts. Writers in British or American English have been more 

conscious than the French of this struggle and the stakes involved, and of 

the valence of the "and."

32

 It was Proust who said that "masterpieces are 

written in a kind of foreign language." That is the same as stammering, 

making language stammer rather than stammering in speech. To be a for-

eigner, but in one's own tongue, not only when speaking a language other 

than one's own. To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and the same lan-

guage, without even a dialect or patois. To be a bastard, a half-breed, but 

through a purification of race. That is when style becomes a language. That 

is when language becomes intensive, a pure continuum of values and inten-

sities. That is when all of language becomes secret, yet has nothing to hide, 

as opposed to when one carves out a secret subsystem within language. One

 

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attains this result only by sobriety, creative subtraction. Continuous varia-

tion has only ascetic lines, a touch of herb and pure water.

 

It is possible to take any linguistic variable and place it in variation fol-

lowing a necessarily virtual continuous line between two of its states. We 

are no longer in the situation of linguists who expect the constants of lan-

guage to experience a kind of mutation or undergo the effects of changes 

accumulated in speech alone. Lines of change or creation are fully and 

directly a part of the abstract machine. Hjelmslev remarked that a language 

necessarily includes unexploited possibilities or potentialities and that the 

abstract machine must include these possibilities or potentialities.

33 

"Potential" and "virtual" are not at all in opposition to "real"; on the con-

trary, the reality of the creative, or the placing-in-continuous variation of 

variables, is in opposition only to the actual determination of their con-

stant relations. Each time we draw a line of variation, the variables are of a 

particular nature (phonological, syntactical or grammatical, semantic, and 

so on), but the line itself is apertinent, asyntactic or agrammatical, 

asemantic. Agrammaticality, for example, is no longer a contingent char-

acteristic of speech opposed to the grammaticality of language; rather, it is 

the ideal characteristic of a line placing grammatical variables in a state of 

continuous variation. Let us take Nicolas Ruwet's examples of certain sin-

gular expressions of Cummings's: "he danced his did," or "they went their 

came." It is possible to reconstitute the variations through which the gram-

matical variables pass in virtuality in order to end up as agrammatical 

expressions of this kind ("he did his dance," "he danced his dance," "he 

danced what he did,"...; "they went as they came," "they went their way," 

.. .).

34

 In spite of Ruwet's structural interpretation, we should avoid taking 

the view that the atypical expression is produced by the successive correct 

forms. It is instead the atypical expression that produces the 

placing-in-variation of the correct forms, uprooting them from their state 

as constants. The atypical expression constitutes a cutting edge of 

deterritorialization of language, it plays the role of tensor; in other words, it 

causes language to tend toward the limit of its elements, forms, or notions, 

toward a near side or a beyond of language. The tensor effects a kind of 

transitivization of the phrase, causing the last term to react upon the pre-

ceding term, back through the entire chain. It assures an intensive and 

chromatic treatment of language. An expression as simple as AND . . . can 

play the role of tensor for all of language. In this sense, 

AND 

is less a 

conjunction than the atypical expression of all of the possible conjunctions 

it places in continuous variation. The tensor, therefore, is not reducible 

either to a constant or a variable, but assures the variation of the variable 

by subtracting in each instance the value of the constant (n - 1). Tensors 

coincide with no linguistic category; nevertheless they are pragmatic

 

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values essential to both assemblages of enunciation and indirect discourses.

35

 

Some believe that these variations do not express the usual labor of cre-

ation in language and remain marginal, confined to poets, children, and 

lunatics. That is because they wish to define the abstract machine by con-

stants that can be modified only secondarily, by a cumulative effect or 

syntagmatic mutation. But the abstract machine of language is not univer-

sal, or even general, but singular; it is not actual, but virtual-real; it has, not 

invariable or obligatory rules, but optional rules that ceaselessly vary with 

the variation itself, as in a game in which each move changes the rules. That 

is why abstract machines and assemblages of enunciation are complemen-

tary, and present in each other. The abstract machine is like the diagram of 

an assemblage. It draws lines of continuous variation, while the concrete 

assemblage treats variables and organized their highly diverse relations as a 

function of those lines. The assemblage negotiates variables at this or that 

level of variation, according to this or that degree of deterritorialization, 

and determines which variables will enter into constant relations or obey 

obligatory rules and which will serve instead as a fluid matter for variation. 

We should not conclude from this that the assemblage brings only a certain 

resistance or inertia to bear against the abstract machine; for even "con-

stants" are essential to the determination of the virtualities through which 

the variation passes, they are themselves optionally chosen. There is 

indeed braking and resistance at a certain level, but at another level of the 

assemblage there is nothing but a come-and-go between different types of 

variables, and corridors of passage traveled in both directions: the varia-

bles effectuate the machine in unison, in the sum of their relations. There is 

therefore no basis for a distinction between a constant and collective lan-

guage, and variable and individual speech acts. The abstract machine is 

always singular, designated by the proper mane of a group or individual, 

while the assemblage of enunciation is always collective, in the individual 

as in the group. The Lenin abstract machine, and the Bolshevik collective 

assemblage .. . The same goes for literature, for music. There is no primacy 

of the individual; there is instead an indissolubility of a singular Abstract 

and a collective Concrete. The abstract machine does not exist indepen-

dently of the assemblage, any more than the assemblage functions inde-

pendently of the machine.

 

IV. "Language Can Be Scientifically Studied Only under the Conditions 

of a Standard or Major Language"

 

Since everybody knows that language is a heterogeneous, variable reality, what 

is the meaning of the linguists' insistence on carving out a homoge-

 

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neous system in order to make a scientific study possible? It is a question of 

extracting a set of constants from the variables, or of determining constant 

relations between variables (this is already evident in the phonologists' 

concept of commutativity). But the scientific model taking language as an 

object of study is one with the political model by which language is homog-

enized, centralized, standardized, becoming a language of power, a major 

or dominant language. Linguistics can claim all it wants to be science, 

nothing but pure science—it wouldn't be the first time that the order of 

pure science was used to secure the requirements of another order. What is 

grammaticality, and the sign S, the categorical symbol that dominates 

statements? It is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker, and 

Chomsky's trees establish constant relations between power variables. 

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the 

prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be 

ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. 

The unity of language is fundamentally political. There is no mother 

tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language that at times 

advances along a broad front, and at times swoops down on diverse centers 

simultaneously. We can conceive of several ways for a language to homoge-

nize, centralize: the republican way is not necessarily the same as the royal 

way, and is not the least harsh.

36

 The scientific enterprise of extracting con-

stants and constant relations is always coupled with the political enterprise 

of imposing them on speakers and transmitting order-words.

 

Speak white and loud

 

yes what a wonderful language

 

for hiring

 

giving orders

 

appointing the hour of death in the works

 

and of the break that refreshes . . .

 

Must a distinction then be made between two kinds of languages, "high" 

and "low," major and minor? The first would be defined precisely by the 

power (pouvoir) of constants, the second by the power (puissance) of varia-

tion. We do not simply wish to make an opposition between the unity of a 

major language and the multiplicity of dialects. Rather, each dialect has a 

zone of transition and variation; or better, each minor language has a prop-

erly dialectical zone of variation. According to Malmberg, it is rare to find 

clear boundaries on dialect maps; instead, there are transitional and 

limitrophe zones, zones of indiscernibility. It is also said that "the 

Quebecois language is so rich in modulations and variations of regional 

accents and in games with tonic accents that it sometimes seems, with no 

exaggeration, that it would be better preserved by musical notation than by

 

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any system of spelling."

37

 The very notion of dialect is quite questionable. 

Moreover, it is relative because one needs to know in relation to what major 

language it exercises its function: for example, the Quebecois language 

must be evaluated not only in relation to standard French but also in rela-

tion to major English, from which it borrows all kinds of phonetic and syn-

tactical elements, in order to set them in variation. The Bantu dialects 

must be evaluated not only in relation to the mother tongue but also in rela-

tion to Afrikaans as a major language, and English as a counter-major lan-

guage preferred by blacks.

38

 In short, the notion of dialect does not 

elucidate that of minor language, but the other way around; it is the minor 

language that defines dialects through its own possibilities for variation. 

Should we identify major and minor languages on the basis of regional situ-

ations of bilingualism or multilingualism including at least one dominant 

language and one dominated language, or a world situation giving certain 

languages an imperialist power over others (for example, the role of Ameri-

can English today)?

 

At least two things prevent us from adopting this point of view. As 

Chomsky notes, a dialect, ghetto language, or minor language is not 

immune to the kind of treatment that draws a homogeneous system from it 

and extracts constants: Black English has its own grammar, which is not 

defined by a sum of mistakes or infractions against standard English; but 

that grammar can be studied only by applying to it the same rules of study 

that are applied to standard English. In this sense, the notions of major and 

minor seem to have no linguistic relevance. When French lost its world-

wide major function it lost nothing of its constancy and homogeneity, its 

centralization. Conversely, Afrikaans attained homogeneity when it was a 

locally minor language struggling against English. Even politically, espe-

cially politically, it is difficult to see how the upholders of a minor language 

can operate if not by giving it (if only by writing in it) a constancy and 

homogeneity making it a locally major language capable of forcing official 

recognition (hence the political role of writers who assert the rights of a 

minor language). But the opposite argument seems more compelling: the 

more a language has or acquires the characteristics of a major language, the 

more it is affected by continuous variations that transpose it into a 

"minor" language. It is futile to criticize the worldwide imperialism of a 

language by denouncing the corruptions it introduces into other languages 

(for example, the purists' criticisms of English influences in French, the 

petit-bourgeois or academic denunciation of "Franglais"). For if a lan-

guage such as British English or American English is major on a world 

scale, it is necessarily worked upon by all the minorities of the world, using 

very diverse procedures of variation. Take the way Gaelic and Irish English 

set English in variation. Or the way Black English and any number of

 

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"ghetto languages" set American English in variation, to the point that 

New York is virtually a city without a language. (Furthermore, American 

English could not have constituted itself without this linguistic labor of the 

minorities.) Or the linguistic situation in the old Austrian empire: German 

was a major language in relation to the minorities, but as such it could not 

avoid being treated by those minorities in a way that made it a minor 

language in relation to the German of the Germans. There is no language 

that does not have intralinguistic, endogenous, internal minorities. So at 

the most general level of linguistics, Chomsky's and Labov's positions are 

constantly passing and converting into each other. Chomsky can say that 

even a minor, dialectical, or ghetto language cannot be studied unless 

invariants are extracted from it and "extrinsic or mixed" variables are 

eliminated; and Labov can respond that even a standard or major language 

cannot be studied independently of "inherent" variations, which are pre-

cisely neither mixed nor extrinsic. You will never find a homogeneous sys-
tem that is not still or already affected by a regulated, continuous, immanent 
process of variation 
(why does Chomsky pretend not to understand this?).

 

There are not, therefore, two kinds of languages but two possible treat-

ments of the same language. Either the variables are treated in such a way 

as to extract from them constants and constant relations or in such a way as 

to place them in continuous variation. We were wrong to give the impres-

sion at times that constants existed alongside variables, linguistic con-

stants alongside variables of enunciation: that was only for convenience of 

presentation. For it is obvious that the constants are drawn from the varia-

bles themselves; universals in linguistics have no more existence in them-

selves than they do in economics and are always concluded from a 

universalization or a rendering-uniform involving variables. Constant is 
not opposed to variable; 
it is a treatment of the variable opposed to the other 

kind of treatment, or continuous variation. So-called obligatory rules cor-

respond to the first kind of treatment, whereas optional rules concern the 

construction of a continuum of variation. Moreover, there are a certain 

number of categories or distinctions that cannot be invoked, that are inap-

plicable and useless as a basis for objections because they presuppose the 

first treatment and are entirely subordinated to the quest for constants: for 

example, language as opposed to speech; synchrony as opposed to 

diachrony; competence as opposed to performance; distinctive features as 

opposed to nondistinctive (or secondarily distinctive) features. For 

nondistinctive features, whether prosodic, stylistic, or pragmatic, are not 

only omnipresent variables, in contrast to the presence or absence of a con-

stant; they are not only superlinear and "suprasegmental" elements, in 

contrast to linear segmental elements; their very characteristics give them 

the power to place all the elements of language in a state of continuous

 

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variation—for example, the impact of tone on phonemes, accent on mor-

phemes, or intonation on syntax. These are not secondary features but 

another treatment of language that no longer operates according to the pre-

ceding categories.

 

"Major" and "minor" do not qualify two different languages but rather 

two usages or functions of language. Bilingualism, of course, provides a 

good example, but once again we use it simply for the sake of convenience. 

Doubtless, in the Austrian empire Czech was a minor language in relation 

to German; but the German of Prague already functioned as a potentially 

minor language in relation to the German of Vienna or Berlin; and Kafka, a 

Czechoslovakian Jew writing in German, submits German to creative 

treatment as a minor language, constructing a continuum of variation, 

negotiating all of the variables both to constrict the constants and to 

expand the variables: make language stammer, or make it "wail," stretch 

tensors through all of language, even written language, and draw from it 

cries, shouts, pitches, durations, timbres, accents, intensities. Two con-

joined tendencies in so-called minor languages have often been noted: an 

impoverishment, a shedding of syntactical and lexical forms; but simulta-

neously a strange proliferation of shifting effects, a taste for overload and 

paraphrase. This applies to the German of Prague, Black English, and 

Quebecois. But with rare exceptions, the interpretation of the linguists has 

been rather malevolent, invoking a consubstantial poverty and preciosity. 

The alleged poverty is in fact a restriction of constants and the overload an 

extension of variations functioning to deploy a continuum sweeping up all 

components. The poverty is not a lack but a void or ellipsis allowing one to 

sidestep a constant instead of tackling it head on, or to approach it from 

above or below instead of positioning oneself within it. And the overload is 

not a rhetorical figure, a metaphor, or symbolic structure; it is a mobile par-

aphrase bearing witness to the unlocalized presence of an indirect dis-

course at the heart of every statement. From both sides we see a rejection of 

reference points, a dissolution of constant form in favor of differences in 

dynamic. The closer a language gets to this state, the closer it comes not 

only to a system of musical notation, but also to music itself.

39

 

Subtract and place in variation, remove and place in variation: a single 

operation. Minor languages are characterized not by overload and poverty 

in relation to a standard or major language, but by a sobriety and variation 

that are like a minor treatment of the standard language, a 

becoming-minor of the major language. The problem is not the 

distinction between major and minor language; it is one of a becoming. It 

is a question not of reterritorializing oneself on a dialect or a patois but of 

deterritorializing the major language. Black Americans do not oppose 

Black to English, they transform the American English that is their own 

language into Black

 

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English. Minor languages do not exist in themselves: they exist only in rela-

tion to a major language and are also investments of that language for the 

purpose of making it minor. One must find the minor language, the dialect 

or rather idiolect, on the basis of which one can make one's own major lan-

guage minor. That is the strength of authors termed "minor," who are in 

fact the greatest, the only greats: having to conquer one's own language, in 

other words, to attain that sobriety in the use of a major language, in order 

to place it in a state of continuous variation (the opposite of regionalism). It 

is in one's own language that one is bilingual or multilingual. Conquer the 

major language in order to delineate in it as yet unknown minor languages. 

Use the minor language to send the major language racing. Minor authors 

are foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they experience 

themselves as bastards, it is due not to a mixing or intermingling of lan-

guages but rather to a subtraction and variation of their own language 

achieved by stretching tensors through it.

 

The notion of minority is very complex, with musical, literary, linguis-

tic, as well as juridical and political, references. The opposition between 

minority and majority is not simply quantitative. Majority implies a con-

stant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to 

evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average 

adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language 

(Joyce's or Ezra Pound's Ulysses). It is obvious that "man" holds the 

majority, even if he is less numerous than mosquitoes, children, women, 

blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice, once 

in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is 

extracted. Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other 

way around. It assumes the standard measure, not the other way around. 

Even Marxism "has almost always translated hegemony from the point of 

view of the national worker, qualified, male and over thirty-five."

40

 A 

determination different from that of the constant will therefore be consid-

ered minoritarian, by nature and regardless of number, in other words, a 

subsystem or an outsystem. This is evident in all the operations, electoral 

or otherwise, where you are given a choice, but on the condition that your 

choice conform to the limits of the constant ("you mustn't choose to 

change society..."). But at this point, everything is reversed. For the 

majority, insofar as it is analytically included in the abstract standard, is 

never anybody, it is always Nobody—Ulysses—whereas the minority is 

the becoming of everybody, one's potential becoming to the extent that one 

deviates from the model. There is a majoritarian "fact," but it is the ana-

lytic fact of Nobody, as opposed to the becoming-minoritarian of every-

body. That is why we must distinguish between: the majoritarian as a 

constant and homogeneous system; minorities as subsystems; and the

 

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minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming. The problem 

is never to acquire the majority, even in order to install a new constant. 

There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All 

becoming is minoritarian. Women, regardless of their numbers, are a 

minority, definable as a state or subset; but they create only by making pos-

sible a becoming over which they do not have ownership, into which they 

themselves must enter; this is a becoming-woman affecting all of human-

kind, men and women both. The same goes for minor languages: they are 

not simply sublanguages, idiolects or dialects, but potential agents of the 

major language's entering into a becoming-minoritarian of all of its dimen-

sions and elements. We should distinguish between minor languages, the 

major language, and the becoming-minor of the major language. Minori-

ties, of course, are objectively definable states, states of language, ethnicity, 

or sex with their own ghetto territorialities, but they must also be thought 

of as seeds, crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable 

movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority. That is why 

Pasolini demonstrated that the essential thing, precisely in free indirect 

discourse, is to be found neither in language A, nor in language B, but "in 

language X, which is none other than language A in the actual process of 

becoming language B."

41

 There is a universal figure of minoritarian con-

sciousness as the becoming of everybody, and that becoming is creation. 

One does not attain it by acquiring the majority. The figure to which we are 

referring is continuous variation, as an amplitude that continually over-

steps the representative threshold of the majoritarian standard, by excess 

or default. In erecting the figure of a universal minoritarian consciousness, 

one addresses powers (puissances) of becoming that belong to a different 

realm from that of Power (Pouvoir) and Domination. Continuous variation 

constitutes the becoming-minoritarian of everybody, as opposed to the 

majoritarian Fact of Nobody. Becoming-minoritarian as the universal fig-

ure of consciousness is called autonomy. It is certainly not by using a minor 

language as a dialect, by regionalizing or ghettoizing, that one becomes 

revolutionary; rather, by using a number of minority elements, by connect-

ing, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous be-

coming.

42

 

The major and minor mode are two different treatments of language, 

one of which consists in extracting constants from it, the other in placing it 

in continuous variation. The order-word is the variable of enunciation that 

effectuates the condition of possibility of language and defines the usage of 

its elements according to one of the two treatments; we must therefore 

return to it as the only "metalanguage" capable of accounting for this dou-

ble direction, this double treatment of variables. The problem of the func-

tions of language is in general poorly formulated because this order-word

 

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variable, which subsumes all possible functions, is overlooked. Following 

Canetti's suggestions, we may begin from the following pragmatic situa-

tion: the order-word is a death sentence; it always implies a death sentence, 

even if it has been considerably softened, becoming symbolic, initiatory, 

temporary, etc. Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive 

the order, or potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must them-

selves inflict, take elsewhere. A father's orders to his son, "You will do 

this," "You will not do that," cannot be separated from the little death sen-

tence the son experiences on a point of his person. Death, death; it is the 

only judgment, and it is what makes judgment a system. The verdict. But 
the order-word is also something else, 
inseparably connected: it is like a 

warning cry or a message to flee. It would be oversimplifying to say that 

flight is a reaction against the order-word; rather, it is included in it, as its 

other face in a complex assemblage, its other component. Canetti is right to 

invoke the lion's roar, which enunciates flight and death simultaneously.

43 

The order-word has two tones. The prophet receives order-words just as 

much in taking flight as in longing for death: Jewish prophetism fused the 

wish to be dead and the flight impulse with the divine order-word.

 

Now if we consider the first aspect of the order-word, in other words, 

death as the expressed of the statement, it clearly meets the preceding 

requirements: even though death essentially concerns bodies, is attributed 

to bodies, its immediacy, its instantaneousness, lends it the authentic char-

acter of an incorporeal transformation. What precedes and follows it may 

be an extensive system of actions and passions, a slow labor of bodies; in 

itself, it is neither action nor passion, but a pure act, a pure transformation 

that enunciation fuses with the statement, the sentence. That man is dead 

... You are already dead when you receive the order-word ... In effect, 

death is everywhere, as that ideal, uncrossable boundary separating bod-

ies, their forms, and states, and as the condition, even initiatory, even sym-

bolic, through which a subject must pass in order to change its form or 

state. This is the sense in which Canetti speaks of "enantiomorphosis":

44

 a 

regime that involves a hieratic and immutable Master who at every 

moment legislates by constants, prohibiting or strictly limiting metamor-

phoses, giving figures clear and stable contours, setting forms in opposi-

tion two by two and requiring subjects to die in order to pass from one form 

to the other. It is always by means of something incorporeal that a body sep-

arates and distinguishes itself from another. The figure, insofar as it is the 

extremity of a body, is the noncorporeal attribute that limits and completes 

that body: death is the Figure. It is through death that a body reaches com-

pletion not only in time but in space, and it is through death that its lines 

form or outline a shape. There are dead spaces just as there are dead times. 

"If [enantiomorphosis is] practiced often the whole world shrivels....

 

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Social prohibitions against metamorphosis are perhaps the most impor-

tant of all. . . . Death itself, the strictest of all boundaries, is what is inter-

posed between classes."

45

 In a regime of this kind, any new body requires 

the erection of an opposable form, as well as the formation of distinct sub-

jects; death is the general incorporeal transformation attributed to all bod-

ies from the standpoint of their forms and substances (for example, the 

body of the Party cannot come into its own without an operation of 

enantiomorphosis, and without the formation of new activists, which 

assumes the elimination of the first generation).

 

It is true that we are bringing in considerations of content as well as 

expression. For even at the moment when the two planes are most distinct, 

as the regime of bodies and the regime of signs in an assemblage, they are 

still in reciprocal presupposition. The incorporeal transformation is the 

expressed of order-words, but also the attribute of bodies. Not only do lin-

guistic variables of expression enter into relations of formal opposition or 

distinction favorable to the extraction of constants; nonlinguistic variables 

of content do also. As Hjelmslev notes, an expression is divided, for exam-

ple, into phonic units in the same way a content is divided into social, zoo-

logical, or physical units ("calf divides into young-bovine-male).

46

 The 

network of binarities, or arborescences, is applicable to both sides. There 

is, however, no analytic resemblance, correspondence, or conformity 

between the two planes. But their independence does not preclude isomor-

phism, in other words, the existence of the same kind of constant relations 

on both sides. It is by virtue of this type of relations that linguistic and 

nonlinguistic elements are inseparable from the start, despite their absence 

of correspondence. The elements of content give the interminglings of bod-

ies clear contours at the same time as the elements of expression give the 

noncorporeal expresseds a power of sentencing or judgment. These ele-

ments are all abstract or deterritorialized to different degrees, but in each 

instance they effect a reterritorialization of the overall assemblage on cer-

tain order-words and contours. Indeed, the significance of the doctrine of 

synthetic judgment is to have demonstrated that there is an a priori link 

(isomorphism) between Sentence and Figure, form of expression and form 

of content.

 

If we consider the other aspect of the order-word, flight rather than 

death, it appears that variables are in a new state, that of continuous varia-

tion. An incorporeal transformation is still attributed to bodies, but it is 

now a passage to the limit: that is the only way, not to eliminate death, but 

to reduce it or make it a variation itself. This movement pushes language to 

its own limits, while bodies are simultaneously caught up in a movement of 

metamorphosis of their contents or a process of exhaustion causing them 

to reach or overstep the limit of their figures. This is an appropriate place to

 

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NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 109

 

bring up the opposition between minor sciences and major sciences: for 

example, the tendency of the broken line to become a curve, a whole opera-

tive geometry of the trait and movement, a pragmatic science of 

placings-in-variation that operates in a different manner than the royal or 

major science of Euclid's invariants and travels a long history of 

suspicion and even repression (we will return to this question later).

47

 The 

smallest interval is always diabolical: the master of metamorphoses is 

opposed to the invariant hieratic king. It is as though an intense matter or 

a continuum of variation were freed, here in the internal tensors of 

language, there in the internal tensions of content. The idea of the 

smallest interval does not apply to figures of the same nature; it implies at 

least a curve and a straight line, a circle and a tangent. We witness a 

transformation of substances and a dissolution of forms, a passage to the 

limit or flight from contours in favor of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and 

matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point. We 

witness the incorporeal power of that intense matter, the material power of 

that language. A matter more immediate, more fluid, and more ardent than 

bodies or words. In continuous variation the relevant distinction is no 

longer between a form of expression and a form of content but between 

two inseparable planes in reciprocal presupposition. The relativity of the 

distinction between them is now fully realized on the plane of 

consistency, where the assemblage is swept up by a now absolute 

deterritorialization. Absolute, however, does not mean undifferentiated: 

differences, now "infinitely small," are constituted in a single matter 

serving both for expression as incorporeal power and for content as 

limitless corporeality. The relation of presupposition between variables of 

content and expression no longer requires two forms: the 

placing-in-variation of the variables instead draws the two forms together 

and effects the conjunction of cutting edges of deterritorialization on both 

sides; this occurs on the plane of a single liberated matter that contains no 

figures, is deliberately unformed, and retains in expression and in content 

only those cutting edges, tensors, and tensions. Gestures and things, voices 

and sounds, are caught up in the same "opera," swept away by the same 

shifting effects of stammering, vibrato, tremolo, and overspilling. A syn-

thesizer places all of the parameters in continuous variation, gradually 

making "fundamentally heterogeneous elements end up turning into each 

other in some way." The moment this conjunction occurs there is a com-

mon matter. It is only at this point that one reaches the abstract machine, or 

the diagram of the assemblage. The synthesizer has replaced judgment, 

and matter has replaced the figure or formed substance. It is no longer even 

appropriate to group biological, physicochemical, and energetic intensi-

ties on the one hand, and mathematical, aesthetic, linguistic, informa-

tional, semiotic intensities, etc., on the other. The multiplicity of systems

 

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HOD 

NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

 

of intensities conjugates or forms a rhizome throughout the entire assem-

blage the moment the assemblage is swept up by these vectors or tensions of 

flight. For the question was not how to elude the order-word but how to 

elude the death sentence it envelops, how to develop its power of escape, 

how to prevent escape from veering into the imaginary or falling into a 

black hole, how to maintain or draw out the revolutionary potentiality of 

the order-word. Hofmannsthal adopts the order-word, "Germany, Ger-

many!", or the need to reterritorialize, even in a "melancholy mirror." But 

beneath this order-word he hears another, as if the old German "figures" 

were mere constants that were then effaced to uncover a relation with 

nature and life all the more profound for being variable. When should this 

relation to life be a hardening, when submission? At what moment is rebel-

lion called for and at what moment surrender or impassibility? When is dry 

speech necessary and when exuberance or amusement?

48

 Whatever the 

breaks and ruptures, only continuous variation brings forth this virtual 

line, this virtual continuum of life, "the essential element of the real 

beneath the everyday." There is a splendid statement in one of Herzog's 

films. The main character asks himself a question and then says, Who will 

answer this answer? Actually, there is no question, answers are all one ever 

answers. To the answer already contained in a question (cross-exam-

ination, competition, plebiscite, etc.) one should respond with questions 

from another answer. One should bring forth the order-word of the 

order-word. In the order-word, life must answer the answer of death, not by 

fleeing, but by making flight act and create. There are pass-words beneath 

order-words. Words that pass, words that are components of passage, 

whereas order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified composi-

tions. A single thing or word undoubtedly has this twofold nature: it is nec-

essary to extract one from the other—to transform the compositions of 

order into components of passage.

 

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5. 587 B.c.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes

 

of Signs

 

The Order of the Ark of the Israelites 

 

A New Regime

 

We call any specific formalization of expression a regime of signs, at least 
when the expression is linguistic. A regime of signs constitutes a semiotic 
system. But it appears difficult to analyze semiotic systems in themselves: 
there is always a form of content that is simultaneously inseparable from 
and independent of the form of expression, and the two forms pertain to 
assemblages that are not principally linguistic. However, one can proceed 
as though the formalization of expression were autonomous and 
self-sufficient. Even if that is done, there is such diversity in the forms of 
expression, such a mixture of these forms, that it is impossible to attach 
any particular privilege to the form or regime of the "signifier." If we call 
the signifying semiotic system semiology, then semiology is only one 
regime of signs among others, and not the most important one. Hence the 
necessity of a return to pragmatics, in which language never has universal-
ity in itself, self-sufficient formalization, a general semiology, or a meta-

 

m

 

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587 B.c.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

 

language. Thus it is the study of the signifying regime that first testifies to 

the inadequacy of linguistic presuppositions, and in the very name of 

regimes of signs.

 

There is a simple general formula for the signifying regime of the sign 

(the signifying sign): every sign refers to another sign, and only to another 

sign, ad infinitum. That is why, at the limit, one can forgo the notion of the 

sign, for what is retained is not principally the sign's relation to a state of 

things it designates, or to an entity it signifies, but only the formal relation 

of sign to sign insofar as it defines a so-called signifying chain. The 

limitlessness of signifiance replaces the sign. When denotation (here, des-

ignation and signification taken together) is assumed to be part of connota-

tion, one is wholly within this signifying regime of the sign. Not much 

attention is paid to indexes, in other words, the territorial states of things 

constituting the designatable. Not much attention is paid to icons, that is, 

operations of reterritorialization constituting the signifiable. Thus the sign 

has already attained a high degree of relative deterritorialization; it is 

thought of as a symbol in a constant movement of referral from sign to sign. 

The signifier is the sign in redundancy with the sign. All signs are signs of 

signs. The question is not yet what a given sign signifies but to which other 

signs it refers, or which signs add themselves to it to form a network with-

out beginning or end that projects its shadow onto an amorphous atmo-

spheric continuum. It is this amorphous continuum that for the moment 

plays the role of the "signified," but it continually glides beneath the 

signifier, for which it serves only as a medium or wall: the specific forms of 

all contents dissolve in it. The atmospherization or mundanization of con-

tents. Contents are abstracted. This is the situation Levi-Strauss describes: 

the world begins to signify before anyone knows what it signifies; the signi-

fied is given without being known.

1

 Your wife looked at you with a funny 

expression. And this morning the mailman handed you a letter from the 

IRS and crossed his fingers. Then you stepped in a pile of dog shit. You saw 

two sticks on the sidewalk positioned like the hands of a watch. They were 

whispering behind your back when you arrived at the office. It doesn't mat-

ter what it means, it's still signifying. The sign that refers to other signs is 

struck with a strange impotence and uncertainty, but mighty is the signifier 

that constitutes the chain. The paranoiac shares this impotence of the 

deterritorialized sign assailing him from every direction in the gliding 

atmosphere, but that only gives him better access to the superpower of the 

signifier, through the royal feeling of wrath, as master of the network 

spreading through the atmosphere. The paranoid despotic regime: they are 

attacking me and making me suffer, but I can guess what they're up to, I'm 

one step ahead of them, I've always known, I have power even in my impo-

tence. "I'll get them."

 

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587 

B.c.-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS D 113

 

Nothing is ever over and done with in a regime of this kind. It's made for 

that, it's the tragic regime of infinite debt, to which one is simultaneously 

debtor and creditor. A sign refers to another sign, into which it passes and 

which carries it into still other signs. "To the point that it returns in a circu-

lar fashion ..." Not only do signs form an infinite network, but the net-

work of signs is infinitely circular. The statement survives its object, the 

name survives its owner. Whether it passes into other signs or is kept in 

reserve for a time, the sign survives both its state of things and its signified; 

it leaps like an animal or a dead person to regain its place in the chain and 

invest a new state, a new signified, from which it will in turn extricate 

itself.

2

 A hint of the eternal return. There is a whole regime of roving, float-

ing statements, suspended names, signs lying in wait to return and be 

propelled by the chain. The signifier as the self-redundancy of the 

deterri-torialized sign, a funereal world of terror.

 

But what counts is less this circularity of signs than the multiplicity of 

the circles or chains. The sign refers not only to other signs in the same cir-

cle, but to signs in other circles or spirals as well. Robert Lowie describes 

how Crow and Hopi men react differently when their wives cheat on them 

(the Crow are nomadic hunters and the Hopi sedentaries with an imperial 

tradition): "A Crow Indian whose wife has cheated on him slashes her face, 

whereas the Hopi who has fallen victim to the same misfortune, without 

losing his calm, withdraws and prays for drought and famine to descend on 

the village." It is easy to see where the paranoia resides, the despotic ele-

ment or signifying regime, or again, as Levi-Strauss says, "the bigotry": "In 

effect, for a Hopi everything is connected: a social disturbance or a domes-

tic incident calls into question the system of the universe, the levels of 

which are united by multiple correspondences; a disruption on one plane is 

only intelligible, and morally tolerable, as a projection of other disruptions 

involving other levels."

3

 The Hopi jump from one circle to another, or from 

one sign to another on a different spiral. One leaves the village or the city, 

only to return. The jumps may be regulated not only by presignifying ritu-

als but also by a whole imperial bureaucracy passing judgment on their 

legitimacy. The jumps are not made at random, they are not without rules. 

Not only are they regulated, but some are prohibited: Do not overstep the 

outermost circle, do not approach the innermost circle .. . There is a dis-

tinction between circles because, although all signs refer to each other only 

to the extent that they are deterritorialized, oriented toward the same cen-

ter of signifiance, distributed throughout an amorphous continuum, they 

have different speeds of deterritorialization attesting to a place of origin 

(temple, palace, house, street, village, bush, etc.), and they have differential 

relations maintaining the distinction between circles or constituting 

thresholds in the atmosphere of the continuum (private and public, family

 

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114 □ 

587 B.c.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

 

incident and social disorder). Moreover, the distribution of these thresh-

olds and circles changes according to the case. Deception is fundamental to 

the system. Jumping from circle to circle, always moving the scene, playing 

it out somewhere else: such is the hysteric operation of the deceiver as sub-

ject, answering to the paranoid operation of the despot installed in his cen-

ter of signifiance.

 

There is one other aspect: the signifying regime is not simply faced with 

the task of organizing into circles signs emitted from every direction; it 

must constantly assure the expansion of the circles or spiral, it must pro-

vide the center with more signifier to overcome the entropy inherent in the 

system and to make new circles blossom or replenish the old. Thus a secon-

dary mechanism in the service of signifiance is necessary: interpretance or 

interpretation. This time the signifier assumes a new figure: it is no longer 

the amorphous continuum that is given without being known and across 

which the network of signs is strung. A portion of signified is made to corre-

spond to a sign or group of signs for which that signified has been deemed 

suitable, thus making it knowable. To the syntagmatic axis of the sign refer-

ring to other signs is added a paradigmatic axis on which the sign, thus for-

malized, fashions for itself a suitable signified (once again there is 

abstraction of the content, but in a new way). The interpretive priest, the 

seer, is one of the despot-god's bureaucrats. A new aspect of deception 

arises, the deception of the priest: interpretation is carried to infinity and 

never encounters anything to interpret that is not already itself an interpre-

tation. The signified constantly reimparts signifier, recharges it or pro-

duces more of it. The form always comes from the signifier. The ultimate 

signified is therefore the signifier itself, in its redundancy or "excess." It is 

perfectly futile to claim to transcend interpretation or even communica-

tion through the production of signifier, because communication and 

interpretation are what always serve to reproduce and produce signifier. 

That is certainly not the way to revive the notion of production. The dis-

covery of the psychoanalyst-priests (a discovery every kind of priest or seer 

made in their time) was that interpretation had to be subordinated to 

signifiance, to the point that the signifier would impart no signified with-

out the signified reimparting signifier in its turn. Actually, there is no 

longer even any need to interpret, but that is because the best interpreta-

tion, the weightiest and most radical one, is an eminently significant 

silence. It is well known that although psychoanalysts have ceased to speak, 

they interpret even more, or better yet, fuel interpretation on the part of the 

subject, who jumps from one circle of hell to the next. In truth, signifiance 

and interpretosis are the two diseases of the earth or the skin, in other 

words, humankind's fundamental neurosis.

 

There is not much to say about the center of signifiance, or the Signifier

 

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B.c.-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS □ 115

 

in person, because it is a pure abstraction no less than a pure principle; in 

other words, it is nothing. Lack or excess, it hardly matters. It comes to the 

same thing to say that the sign refers to other signs ad infinitum and that the 

infinite set of all signs refers to a supreme signifier. At any rate, this pure 

formal redundancy of the signifier could not even be conceptualized if it 

did not have its own substance of expression, for which we must find a 

name:  faciality.  Not only is language always accompanied by faciality 

traits, but the face crystallizes all redundancies, it emits and receives, 

releases and recaptures signifying signs. It is a whole body unto itself: it is 

like the body of the center of signifiance to which all of the deterritorialized 

signs affix themselves, and it marks the limit of their deterritorialization. 

The voice emanates from the face; that is why, however fundamentally 

important the writing machine is in the imperial bureaucracy, what is writ-

ten retains an oral or nonbook character. The face is the Icon proper to the 

signifying regime, the reterritorialization internal to the system. The 

signifier reterritorializes on the face. The face is what gives the signifier 

substance; it is what fuels interpretation, and it is what changes, changes 

traits, when interpretation reimparts signifier to its substance. Look, his 

expression changed. The signifier is always facialized. Faciality reigns 

materially over that whole constellation of signifiances and interpretations 

(psychologists have written extensively on the baby's relations to the moth-

er's face, and sociologists on the role of the face in mass media and adver-

tising). The despot-god has never hidden his face, far from it: he makes 

himself one, or even several. The mask does not hide the face, it is the face. 

The priest administers the face of the god. With the despot, everything is 

public, and everything that is public is so by virtue of the face. Lies and 

deception may be a fundamental part of the signifying regime, but secrecy 

is not.

4

 Conversely, when the face is effaced, when the faciality traits dis-

appear, we can be sure that we have entered another regime, other zones 

infinitely muter and more imperceptible where subterranean 

becomings-animal occur, becomings-molecular, nocturnal 

deterritorializations over-spilling the limits of the signifying system. The 

despot or god brandishes the solar face that is his entire body, as the body 

of the signifier. He looked at me queerly, he knitted his brow, what did I 

do to make him change expression? I have her picture in front of me, it's as 

if she were watching me ... Surveillance by the face, as Strindberg said. 

Overcoding by the signifier, irradiation in all directions, unlocalized 

omnipresence.

 

Finally, the face or body of the despot or god has something like a 

counterbody: the body of the tortured, or better, of the excluded. There is 

no question that these two bodies communicate, for the body of the despot 

is sometimes subjected to trials of humiliation or even torture, or of exile 

and exclusion. "At the opposite pole one might imagine placing the body of

 

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1

16 □ 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

 

the condemned man; he, too, has his legal status; he gives rise to his own 

ceremonial... not in order to ground the surplus power possessed by the 

person of the sovereign, but in order to code the lack of power with which 

those subjected to punishment are marked. In the darkest region of the 

political field the condemned man outlines the symmetrical, inverted fig-

ure of the king."

5

 The one who is tortured is fundamentally one who loses 

his or her face, entering into a becoming-animal, a becoming-molecular the 

ashes of which are thrown to the wind. But it appears that the one who is 

tortured is not at all the final term, but rather the first step before exclu-

sion. Oedipus, at least, understood that. He tortured himself, gouged out 

his own eyes, then went away. The rite, the becoming-animal of the scape-

goat clearly illustrates this: a first expiatory animal is sacrificed, but a sec-

ond is driven away, sent out into the desert wilderness. In the signifying 

regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the 

system of signs: it is charged with everything that was "bad" in a given 

period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs, everything that 

eluded the referral from sign to sign through the different circles; it also 

assumes everything that was unable to recharge the signifier at its center 

and carries off everything that spills beyond the outermost circle. Finally, 

and especially, it incarnates that line of flight the signifying regime cannot 

tolerate, in other words, an absolute deterritorialization; the regime must 

block a line of this kind or define it in an entirely negative fashion precisely 

because it exceeds the degree of deterritorialization of the signifying sign, 

however high it may be. The line of flight is like a tangent to the circles of 

signifiance and the center of the signifier. It is under a curse. The goat's 

anus stands opposite the face of the despot or god. Anything that threatens 

to put the system to flight will be killed or put to flight itself. Anything that 

exceeds the excess of the signifier or passes beneath it will be marked with a 

negative value. Your only choice will be between a goat's ass and the face of 

the god, between sorcerers and priests. The complete system, then, consists 

of the paranoid face or body of the despot-god in the signifying center of the 

temple; the interpreting priests who continually recharge the signified in 

the temple, transforming it into signifier; the hysterical crowd of people 

outside, clumped in tight circles, who jump from one circle to another; the 

faceless, depressive scapegoat emanating from the center, chosen, treated, 

and adorned by the priests, cutting across the circles in its headlong flight 

into the desert. This excessively hasty overview is applicable not only to the 

imperial despotic regime but to all subjected, arborescent, hierarchical, 

centered groups: political parties, literary movements, psychoanalytic 

associations, families, conjugal units, etc. The photo, faciality, redun-

dancy, signifiance, and interpretation are at work everywhere. The dreary 

world of the signifier; its archaism with an always contemporary function;

 

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its essential deception, connoting all of its aspects; its profound antics. 

The signifier reigns over every domestic squabble, and in every State 

apparatus.

 

The signifying regime of the sign is defined by eight aspects or princi-

ples: (1) the sign refers to another sign, ad infinitum (the limitlessness of 

signifiance, which deterritorializes the sign); (2) the sign is brought back by 

other signs and never ceases to return (the circularity of the 

deterrito-rialized sign); (3) the sign jumps from circle to circle and 

constantly displaces the center at the same time as it ties into it (the 

metaphor or hysteria of signs); (4) the expansion of the circles is assured by 

interpretations that impart signified and reimpart signifier (the 

interpretosis of the priest); (5) the infinite set of signs refers to a supreme 

signifier presenting itself as both lack and excess (the despotic signifier, the 

limit of the system's deterrito-rialization); (6) the form of the signifier has a 

substance, or the signifier has a body, namely, the Face (the principle of 

faciality traits, which constitute a reterritorialization); (7) the system's line 

of flight is assigned a negative value, condemned as that which exceeds 

the signifying regime's power of deterritorialization (the principle of the 

scapegoat); (8) the regime is one of universal deception, in its jumps, in the 

regulated circles, in the seer's regulation of interpretations, in the 

publicness of the facialized center, and in the treatment of the line of 

flight.

 

Not only is this semiotic system not the first, but we see no reason to 

accord it any particular privilege from the standpoint of an abstract evolu-

tionism. We would like to indicate very briefly certain characteristics of the 

other two semiotic systems. First, the so-called primitive, presignifying 
semiotic,  
which is much closer to "natural" codings operating without 

signs. There is no reduction to faciality as the sole substance of expression: 

there is no elimination of forms of content through abstraction of the signi-

fied. To the extent that there is still abstraction of content from a strictly 

semiotic point of view, it fosters a pluralism or polyvocality of forms of 

expression that prevents any power takeover by the signifier and preserves 

expressive forms particular to content; thus forms of corporeality, 

gesturality, rhythm, dance, and rite coexist heterogeneously with the vocal 

form.

6

 A variety of forms and substances of expression intersect and form 

relays. It is a segmentary but plurilinear, multidimensional semiotic that 

wards off any kind of signifying circularity. Segmentarity is the law of the 

lineages. Here, the sign owes its degree of relative deterritorialization not 

to a perpetual referral to other signs but rather to a confrontation between 

the territorialities and compared segments from which each sign is 

extracted (the camp, the bush, the moving of the camp). Not only is the 

polyvocality of statements preserved, but it is possible to finish with a 

statement: A name that has been used up is abolished, a situation quite

 

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unlike the placing in reserve or transformation occurring in the signifying 

semiotic. The meaning of cannibalism in a presignifying regime is pre-

cisely this: eating the name, a semiography that is fully a part of a semiotic 

in spite of its relation to content (the relation is an expressive one).

7

 It 

should not be thought that a semiotic of this kind functions by ignorance, 

repression, or foreclosure of the signifier. On the contrary, it is animated by 

a keen presentiment of what is to come. It does not need to understand it to 

fight against it. It is wholly destined by its very segmentarity and 

poly-vocality to avert the already-present threat: universalizing 

abstraction, erection of the signifier, circularity of statements, and their 

correlates, the State apparatus, the instatement of the despot, the priestly 

caste, the scapegoat, etc. Every time they eat a dead man, they can say: one 

more the State won't get.

 

There is another semiotic, the countersignifying semiotic (whose most 

notable representatives are the fearsome, warlike, and animal-raising 

nomads, as opposed to hunter nomads, who belong to the previous 

semiotic). This time, the semiotic proceeds less by segmentarity than by 

arithmetic and numeration. Of course, the number already played a role of 

great importance in the division and union of segmentary lineages; it also 

had a function of decisive importance in the signifying imperial bureau-

cracy. But that was a kind of number that represented or signified, a num-

ber "incited, produced, caused by something other than itself." On the 

contrary, a numerical sign that is not produced by something outside the 

system of marking it institutes, which marks a mobile and plural distribu-

tion, which itself determines functions and relations, which arrives at 

arrangements rather than totals, distributions rather than collections, 

which operates more by breaks, transitions, migration, and accumulation 

than by combining units—a sign of this kind would appear to belong to the 

semiotic of a nomad war machine directed against the State apparatus. The 

numbering number.

8

 Its numerical organization into tens, fifties, hun-

dreds, thousands, etc., and the associated spatial organization were obvi-

ously adopted by State armies, but basically bear witness to a military 

system specific to the great nomads of the steppes, from the Hyksos to the 

Mongols. They were superposed upon the principle of lineage. Secrecy and 

spying are important elements of the war machine's semiotic of Numbers. 

The role of Numbers in the Bible is not unrelated to the nomads, since 

Moses got the idea from his father-in-law, Jethro the Kenite: he used it as an 

organizational principle for the march and migration, and applied it him-

self to the military domain. In this countersignifying regime, the imperial 

despotic line of flight is replaced by a line of abolition that turns back 

against the great empires, cuts across them and destroys them, or else con-

quers them and integrates with them to form a mixed semiotic.

 

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We would like to go into greater detail on a fourth regime of signs, the 

postsignifying  regime, which has different characteristics opposing it to 

signifiance and is defined by a unique procedure, that of 

"subjecti-fication."

 

There are many regimes of signs. Our own list is arbitrarily limited. 

There is no reason to identify a regime or a semiotic system with a people 

or historical moment. There is such mixture within the same period or the 

same people that we can say no more than that a given people, language, 

or period assures the relative dominance of a certain regime. Perhaps all 

semiotics are mixed and not only combine with various forms of content 

but also combine different regimes of signs. Presignifying elements are 

always active in the signifying regime; countersignifying elements are 

always present and at work within it; and postsignifying elements are 

already there. Even that is to mark too much temporality. The semiotics 

and their mixtures may appear in a history of confrontation and inter-

mingling of peoples, but also in languages in which there are several com-

peting functions, or in a psychiatric hospital in which different forms of 

insanity coexist among the patients or even combine in a single patient; or 

in an ordinary conversation in which people are speaking the same 

tongue but different languages (all of a sudden a fragment of an unex-

pected semiotic surfaces). We are not suggesting an evolutionism, we are 

not even doing history. Semiotic systems depend on assemblages, and it is 

the assemblages that determine that a given people, period, or language, 

and even a given style, fashion, pathology, or minuscule event in a limited 

situation, can assure the predominance of one semiotic or another. We 

are trying to make maps of regimes of signs: we can turn them around or 

retain selected coordinates or dimensions, and depending on the case we 

will be dealing with a social formation, a pathological delusion (d'elire), 

historical event, etc. We will see this on another occasion when we deal 

with a dated social system, "courtly love," and then switch to a private 

enterprise called "masochism." We can also combine maps or separate 

them. To make the distinction between two types of semiotics (for exam-

ple, the postsignifying regime and the signifying regime), we must con-

sider very diverse domains simultaneously.

 

In the first years of the twentieth century, psychiatry, at the height of its 

clinical skills, confronted the problem of nonhallucinatory delusions in 

which mental integrity is retained without "intellectual diminishment." 

There was a first major grouping, paranoid or interpretive delusions, 

which already subsumed various aspects. But the question of the possible 

independence of another group was prefigured in Esquirol's monomania 

and Kraepelin's querulous delusion, and later defined by Serieux and 

Capgras as grievance delusion, and by Clerambault as passional delusion

 

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("querulousness or seeking redress, jealousy, erotomania"). Basing our-

selves on very fine studies of Serieux and Capgras on the one hand, and 

Clerambault on the other (the latter took the distinction furthest), we will 

contrast a paranoid-interpretive ideal regime of signifiance with a 

passional, postsignifying subjective regime. The first regime is defined by 

an insidious onset and a hidden center bearing witness to endogenous 

forces organized around an idea; by the development of a network stretch-

ing across an amorphous continuum, a gliding atmosphere into which the 

slightest incident may be carried; by an organization of radiating circles 

expanding by circular irradiation in all directions, and in which the indi-

vidual jumps from one point to another, one circle to another, approaches 

the center then moves away, operates prospectively and retrospectively; 

and by a transformation of the atmosphere, as a function of variable traits 

or secondary centers clustered around a principal nucleus. The second 

regime, on the contrary, is defined by a decisive external occurrence, by a 

relation with the outside that is expressed more as an emotion than an idea, 

and more as effort or action than imagination ("active delusion rather than 

ideational delusion"); by a limited constellation operating in a single sec-

tor; by a "postulate" or "concise formula" serving as the point of departure 

for a linear series or proceeding that runs its course, at which point a new 

proceeding begins. In short, it operates by the linear and temporal succes-
sion of finite proceedings, rather than by the simultaneity of circles in unlim-
ited expansion.

9

 

This story of two kinds of delusions without intellectual diminishment 

is of great importance. For it is not a disruption of a preexisting discipline 

of psychiatry; it lies at the heart of the constitution of the psychiatrist in the 

nineteenth century and explains why he or she was from the start what he 

or she has been ever since: the psychiatrist was born cornered, caught 

between legal, police, humanitarian demands, accused of not being a true 

doctor, suspected of mistaking the sane for mad and the mad for sane, prey 

to quandaries of conscience, the last Hegelian belle ame. If we consider the 

two types of intact delusions, we can say that people in the first group seem 

to be completely mad, but aren't: President Schreber developed his radiat-

ing paranoia and relations with God in every direction, but he was not mad 

in that he remained capable of managing his wealth wisely and distinguish-

ing between circles. At the other pole are those who do not seem mad in any 

way, but are, as borne out by their sudden actions, such as quarrels, arsons, 

murders (Esquirol's four great monomanias, erotic, intellectual, arson, 

and homocidal, already belong in this category). In short, psychiatry was 

not at all constituted in relation to the concept of madness, or even as a 

modification of that concept, but rather by its split in these two opposite 
directions. 
And is it not our own double image, all of ours, that psychiatry

 

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thus reveals: seeming mad withoutt>eing it, then being it without seeming 

it? (This twofold assertion is also psychoanalysis's point of departure, its 

way of linking into psychiatry: we seem to be mad but aren't, observe the 

dream; we are mad but don't seem to be, observe everyday life.) Thus psy-

chiatrists were alternately in the position of on the one hand pleading for 

tolerance and understanding, underscoring the uselessness of confine-

ment, appealing for open-door asylums; and on the other arguing for 

stepped-up surveillance and special high-security asylums, stricter mea-

sures necessitated by the fact that the mad seemed not to be.

10

 Is it by 

chance that the distinction between the two major kinds of delusions, idea-

tional and active, in many ways recapitulates the distinction between the 

classes (paranoiacs do not particularly need to be committed, they are usu-

ally bourgeois, whereas monomaniacs, passional redress-seekers, are most 

often from the working and rural classes, or are marginal, as in the case of 

political assassins).'' A class with radiant, irradiating ideas (but of course!) 

against a class reduced to linear, sporadic, partial, local actions ... All par-

anoiacs are not bourgeois, all passionals or monomaniacs are not proletar-

ian. But God and his psychiatrists are charged with recognizing, among 

these de facto mixes, those who preserve, even in delusion, the class-based 

social order, and those who sow disorder, even strictly localized, such as 

haystack fires, parental murders, declasse love and aggression.

 

We are trying, then, to make a distinction between a paranoid, signify-

ing, despotic regime of signs and a passional or subjective, postsignifying, 

authoritarian regime. Authoritarian is assuredly not the same as despotic, 

passional is not the same as paranoid, and subjective is not the same as sig-

nifying. What happens in the second regime, by comparison with the signi-

fying regime as we have already defined it? In the first place, a sign or 
packet of signs detaches from the irradiating circular network 
and sets to 

work on its own account, starts running a straight line, as though swept into 

a narrow, open passage. Already the signifying system drew a line of flight 

or deterritorialization exceeding the specific index of its deterritorialized 

signs, but the system gave that line a negative value and sent the scapegoat 

fleeing down it. Here, it seems that the line receives a positive sign, as 

though it were effectively occupied and followed by a people who find in it 

their reason for being or destiny. Once again, we are not, of course, doing 

history: we are not saying that a people invents this regime of signs, only 

that at a given moment a people effectuates the assemblage that assures the 

relative dominance of that regime under certain historical conditions (and 

that regime, that dominance, that assemblage may be assured under other 

conditions, for example, pathological, literary, romantic, or entirely mun-

dane). We are not saying that a people is possessed by a given type of 

delusion but that the map of a delusion, its coordinates considered, may

 

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coincide with the map of a people, its coordinates considered. The para-

noid Pharaoh and the passional Hebrew? In the case of the Jewish people, a 

group of signs detaches from the Egyptian imperial network of which it was 

a part and sets off down a line of flight into the desert, pitting the most 

authoritarian of subjectivities against despotic signifiance, the most 

passional and least interpretive of delusions against interpretational 

paranoid delusion, in short, a linear "proceeding and grievance" against 

the irradiating circular network. Your grievance, your proceeding: that is 

Moses' word to his people, and the proceedings come one after the other 

along a line of Passion.

12

 From this Kafka derives his own conception of 

querulousness or the proceeding, and the succession of linear segments: 

the father-proceeding, hotel-proceeding, ship-proceeding, court-pro-

ceeding . ..

 

We cannot overlook the most fundamental or extensive event in the his-

tory of the Jewish people: the destruction of the Temple, in two stages (587 

B.C. and A.D. 70). The whole history of the Temple—the mobility and fra-

gility of the ark, then the construction of a House by Solomon, its recon-

struction under Darius, etc.—has meaning only in relation to renewed 

proceedings of destruction, the two supreme moments of which came with 

Nebuchadnezzar and Titus. A temple, mobile, fragile, or destroyed: the ark 

is no more than a little portable packet of signs. An entirely negative line of 

flight occupied by the animal or scapegoat laden with all the dangers 

threatening the signifier has become an impossibility. Let misfortune 

befall us: this formula punctuates Jewish history. It is we who must follow 

the most deterritorialized line, the line of the scapegoat, but we will change 

its sign, we will turn it into the positive line of our subjectivity, our Passion, 

our proceeding or grievance. We will be our own scapegoat. We will be the 

lamb: "The God who, like a lion, was given blood sacrifice must be shoved 

into the background, and the sacrificed god must occupy the foreground. 

... God became the animal that was slain, instead of the animal that does 

the slaying."

13

 We will follow, we will wed the tangent separating the land 

from the waters, we will separate the circular network from the gliding 

continuum, we will make the line of separation our own, in order to forge 

our path along it and dissociate the elements of the signifier (the dove of the 

ark). A narrow line of march, an in-between that is not a mean but a 

slender line. There is a Jewish specificity, immediately affirmed in a 

semiotic system. This semiotic, however, is no less mixed than any other. 

On the one hand, it is intimately related to the countersignifying regime of 

the nomads (the Hebrews had a nomadic past, a continuing relationship 

with the nomadic numerical organization that inspired them, and their 

own particular becoming-nomad; their line of deterritorialization owed 

much to the military line of nomadic destruction).

14

 On the other hand, it

 

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has an essential relation to the signifying semiotic itself, for which the 

Hebrews and their God would always be nostalgic: reestablish an imperial 

society and integrate with it, enthrone a king like everybody else (Samuel), 

rebuild a temple that would finally be solid (David and Solomon, 

Zachariah), erect the spiral of the Tower of Babel and find the face of God 

again; not just bring the wandering to a halt, but overcome the diaspora, 

which itself exists only as a function of an ideal regathering. We only have 

space to indicate what, in this mixed semiotic, bears witness to the new 

postsignifying subjective or passional regime.

 

Faciality undergoes a profound transformation. The god averts his face, 

which must be seen by no one; and the subject, gripped by a veritable fear of 

the god, averts his or her face in turn. The averted faces, in profile, replace 

the frontal view of the radiant face. It is this double turning away that draws 

the positive line of flight. The prophet is the main figure in this assemblage; 

he needs a sign to guarantee the word of God, he is himself marked by a sign 

indicating the special regime to which he belongs. It is Spinoza who has 

elaborated the profoundest theory of prophetism, taking into account the 

semiotic proper to it. Cain, who turns away from the God who turns away 

from him, already follows the line of deterritorialization, protected by a 

sign allowing him to escape death. The mark of Cain. A punishment worse 

than imperial death? The Jewish God invented the reprieve, existence in 

reprieve, indefinite postponement.

15

 But He also invented the positivity of 

alliance, or the covenant, as the new relation with the deity, since the sub-

ject remains alive. Abel, whose name is vanity, is nothing; Cain is the true 

man. This is very different from the system of rigging or deception animat-

ing the face of the signifier, the interpretation of the seer and the displace-

ments of the subject. It is the regime of betrayal, universal betrayal, in 

which the true man never ceases to betray God just as God betrays man, 

with the wrath of God defining the new positivity. Before his death, Moses 

receives the words of the great song of betrayal. Even the prophet, unlike 

the seer-priest, is fundamentally a traitor and thus fulfills God's order bet-

ter than anyone who remained faithful could. God calls upon Jonah to go to 

Nineveh to entreat the inhabitants, who had repeatedly betrayed God, to 

mend their ways. But Jonah's first act is to take off in the opposite direc-

tion; he also betrays God, fleeing "far from the face of Adonai."

16

 He takes a 

ship for Tarshish and sleeps, like a righteous man. The tempest sent by 

God causes him to be thrown into the sea, where he is swallowed by the 

great fish and vomited out at the boundary between land and water, the 

limit of separation or line of flight earlier occupied by the dove of the Ark 

(Jonah, precisely, is the word for dove). But Jonah, in fleeing from the face 

of God, did exactly what God had wanted: he took the evil of Nineveh 

upon himself; he did it even more effectively than God had wanted, he

 

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anticipated God. That is why he slept like a righteous man. God let him 

live, temporarily protected by the tree of Cain, but then made the tree die 

because Jonah had renewed the covenant by occupying the line of flight.

17 

Jesus universalizes the system of betrayal: he betrays the God of the Jews, 

he betrays the Jews, he is betrayed by God ("Why hast thou forsaken me?" 

[Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34—Trans.]), he is betrayed by Judas, the true 

man. He took evil upon himself, but the Jews who kill him also take it upon 

themselves. Jesus is asked for a sign of his divine descendance: he invokes 

the sign of Jonah [Luke 11:29—Trans.]. Cain, Jonah, and Jesus constitute 

three great linear proceedings along which signs rush and form relays. 

There are many others. Everywhere a double turning away on a line of 

flight.

 

When a prophet declines the burden God entrusts to him (Moses, 

Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc.), it is not because the burden would have been too 

heavy, as with an imperial oracle or seer who refuses a dangerous mission. 

It is instead a case like Jonah's, who by hiding and fleeing and betraying 

anticipates the will of God more effectively than if he had obeyed. The 

prophet is always being forced by God, literally violated by him, much 

more than inspired by him. The prophet is not a priest. The prophet does 

not know how to talk, God puts the words in his mouth: word-ingestion, a 

new form of semiophagy. Unlike the seer, the prophet interprets nothing: 
his delusion is active rather than ideational or imaginative, his relation to 

God is passional and authoritative rather than despotic and signifying; he 

anticipates and detects the powers {puissances) of the future rather than 

applying past and present powers (pouvoirs). Faciality traits no longer func-

tion to prevent the formation of a line of flight, or to form a body of 

signifiance controlling that line and sending only a faceless goat down it. 

Rather, it is faciality itself that organizes the line of flight, in the face-off 

between two countenances that become gaunt and turn away in profile. 

Betrayal has become an idee fixe, the main obsession, replacing the deceit 

of the paranoiac and the hysteric. The "persecutor-persecuted" relation 

has no relevance whatsoever: its meaning is altogether different in the 

authoritarian passional regime than in the despotic paranoid regime.

 

Something is still bothering us: the story of Oedipus. Oedipus is almost 

unique in the Greek world. The whole first part is imperial, despotic, para-

noid, interpretive, divinatory. But the whole second part is Oedipus's wan-

dering, his line of flight, the double turning away of his own face and that of 

God. Rather than very precise limits to be crossed in order, or which one 

does not have the right to cross (hybris), there is a concealed limit toward 

which Oedipus is swept. Rather than interpretive signifying irradiation, 

there is a subjective linear proceeding permitting Oedipus to keep a secret, 

but only as a residue capable of starting a new linear proceeding. Oedipus,

 

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his name is atheos: he invents something worse than death or exile, he wan-

ders and survives on a strangely positive line of separation or 

deterri-torialization. Holderlin and Heidegger see this as the birth of the 
double turning away, the change of face, and also the birth of modern 

tragedy, for which they bizarrely credit the Greeks: the outcome is no 

longer murder or sudden death but survival under reprieve, unlimited 

postponement.

18 

Nietzsche suggests that Oedipus, as opposed to 

Prometheus, was the Semitic myth of the Greeks, the glorification of 

Passion or passivity.'

9

 Oedipus: Greek Cain. Let us return to 

psychoanalysis. It was not by chance that Freud pounced upon Oedipus. 

Psychoanalysis is a definite case of a mixed semiotic: a despotic regime 

of signifiance and interpretation, with irradiation of the face, but also an 

authoritarian regime of subjectification and prophetism, with a turning 

away of the face (the positioning of the psychoanalyst behind the patient 

suddenly assumes its full significance). Recent efforts to explain that a 

"signifier represents the subject for another signifier" are typically 

syncretic: a linear proceeding of subjectivity along with a circular 

development of the signifier and interpretation. Two absolutely different 

regimes of signs in a mix. But the worst, most underhanded of powers are 

founded on it.

 

One more remark on the story of authoritarian passional betrayal, as 

opposed to despotic paranoid deception. Everything is infamy, but Borges 

botched his history of universal infamy.

20

 He should have distinguished 

between the great realm of deceptions and the great realm of betrayals. And 

also between the various figures of betrayal. There is, in effect, a second fig-

ure of betrayal that springs up at certain places at certain times, but always 

as a function of a variable assemblage with new components. Christianity 

is a particularly important case of a mixed semiotic, with its signifying 

imperial combination together with its postsignifying Jewish subjectivity. 

It transforms both the ideal signifying system and the postsignifying 

passional system. It invents a new assemblage. Heresies are still a part of 

deception, just as orthodoxy is a part of signifiance. But there are heresies 

that are more than heresies and profess pure treason, for example, the 

Buggers; it is not by chance that the Bulgars played a special role.

21

 Beware 

the Bulgars, as Monsieur Plume would say. The problem is one of territori-

alities in relation to deep movements of deterritorialization. England, 

another territoriality or another deterritorialization: Cromwell, every-

where a traitor, a straight line of passional subjectification opposed to the 

royal center of signifiance and the intermediary circles: the dictator against 

the despot. Richard III, the deformed, the twisted, whose ideal is to betray 

everything: he confronts Lady Anne in a face-off in which the two counte-

nances turn away, but each knows she or he is the other's, destined for the 

other. This is unlike Shakespeare's other historical dramas, in which kings

 

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and assassins deceive in order to take power but then become good kings. 

That kind are men of the State. Richard III comes from elsewhere: his ven-

tures, including those with women, derive more from a war machine than 

from a State apparatus. He is the traitor, springing from the great nomads 

and their secrecy. He says so from the beginning, when he mentions a secret 

project infinitely surpassing the conquest of power. He wants to return the 

war machine both to the fragile State and pacified couples. The only one to 

guess is Lady Anne, fascinated, terrified, consenting. Elizabethan theater 

is full of these traitorous characters who aspire to be absolute traitors, in 

opposition to the deceptions of the man of the court or even of the State.

 

How many betrayals accompanied the great discoveries of Christen-

dom, the discovery of new lands and continents! Lines of 

deterrito-rialization on which small groups betray everything, their 

companions, the king, the indigenous peoples, the neighboring explorer, in 

the mad hope of founding, with a woman of their family, a race that 

would finally be pure and represent a new beginning. Herzog's film, 
Aguirre,  is very Shakespearean. Aguirre asks, How can one be a traitor 

everywhere and in everything? I'm the only traitor here. No more 

deception, it's time for betrayal. What a grandiose dream! I will be the last 

traitor, the total traitor, and therefore the last man.

 

Then there was the Reformation: the extraordinary figure of Luther, as 

traitor to all things and all people; his personal relation with the Devil 

resulting in betrayal, through good deeds as well as bad.

 

These new figures of betrayal always return to the Old Testament: I am 

the wrath of God. But betrayal has become humanist, it does not fall 

between God and his own men; it relies on God, but falls between the men 

of God and the others, denounced as deceivers. In the end, there is only one 

man of God or of the wrath of God, a single betrayer against all deceivers. 

But every deceiver is mixed, and which does not take him- or herself to be 

the one? And what betrayer does not say to him- or herself at some point 

that he or she was nothing but a deceiver after all? (See the strange case of 

Maurice Sachs.)

 

It is clear that the book, or what takes its place, has a different meaning 

in the signifying paranoid regime than in the postsignifying passional 

regime. In the first case, there is an emission of the despotic signifier, and 

its interpretation by scribes and priests, which fixes the signified and 

reimparts signifier; but there is also, from sign to sign, a movement from 

one territory to another, a circulation assuring a certain speed of 

deterritorialization (for example, the circulation of an epic, or the rivalry 

between several cities for the birth of a hero, or, once again, the role of 

scribe-priests in exchanges of territorialities and genealogies).

22

 What 

takes the place of the book always has an external model, a referent, face,

 

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family, or territory that preserves the book's oral character. On the con-

trary, in the passional regime the book seems to be internalized, and to 

internalize everything: it becomes the sacred written Book. It takes the 

place of the face and God, who hides his face and gives Moses the inscribed 

stone tablets. God manifests himself through trumpets and the Voice, but 

what is heard in sound is the nonface, just as what is seen in the book are 

words. The book has become the body of passion, just as the face was the 

body of the signifier. It is now the book, the most deterritorialized of 

things, that fixes territories and genealogies. The latter are what the book 

says, and the former the place at which the book is said. The function of 

interpretation has totally changed. Or it disappears entirely in favor of a 

pure and literal recitation forbidding the slightest change, addition, or 

commentary (the famous "stultify yourself of the Christians belongs to 

this passional line; the Koran goes the furthest in this direction). Or else 

interpretation survives but becomes internal to the book itself, which loses 

its circulatory function for outside elements: for example, the different 

types of coded interpretation are fixed according to axes internal to the 

book; interpretation is organized according to correspondences between 

two books, such as the Old and New Testaments, and may even induce a 

third book suffused by the same element of interiority.

23

 Finally, interpre-

tation may reject all intermediaries or specialists and become direct, since 

the book is written both in itself and in the heart, once as a point of 

subjectification and again in the subject (the Reformation conception of 

the book). In any case, this is the point of departure for the delusional pas-

sion of the book as origin and finality of the world. The unique book, the 

total work, all possible combinations inside the book, the tree-book, the 

cosmos-book: all of these platitudes so dear to the avant-gardes, which cut 

the book off from its relations with the outside, are even worse than the 

chant of the signifier. Of course, they are entirely bound up with a mixed 

semiotic. But in truth they have a particularly pious origin. Wagner, 

Mallarme, and Joyce, Marx and Freud: still Bibles. If passional delusion is 

profoundly monomaniacal, monomania for its part found a fundamental 

element of its assemblage in monotheism and the Book. The strangest cult. 

This is how things are in the passional regime, or the regime of 

subjectification. There is no longer a center of signifiance connected to 

expanding circles or an expanding spiral, but a point of subjectification 

constituting the point of departure of the line. There is no longer a 

signifier-signified relation, but a subject of enunciation issuing from the 

point of subjectification and a subject of the statement in a determinable 

relation to the first subject. There is no longer sign-to-sign circularity, but a 

linear proceeding into which the sign is swept via subjects. We may con-

sider these three diverse realms.

 

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1.  The Jews as opposed to the empires. God withdraws his face, becom-

ing a point of subjectification for the drawing of a line of flight or 

deterritorialization; Moses is the subject of enunciation, constituted on the 

basis of the tablets of God that replace the face; the Jewish people consti-

tute the subject of the statement, for betrayal as well as for a new land, and 

enter an ever-renewed covenant or linear "proceeding" rather than a circu-

lar expansion. 

2.  So-called modern, or Christian, philosophy: Descartes as opposed to 

ancient philosophy. There is a primacy of the idea of the infinite as an 

absolutely necessary point of subjectification. The Cogito, consciousness, 

the "I think" is the subject of enunciation that reflects its own use and 

conceives of itself following a line of deterritorialization represented by 

methodical doubt. The subject of the statement is the union of the soul and 

the body, or feeling, guaranteed in a complex way by the cogito, and per-

forms the necessary reterritorializations. The cogito is a proceeding that 

must always be recommenced, haunted by the possibility of betrayal, a 

deceitful God, and an evil Genius. When Descartes says, I can infer "I 

think therefore I am" but not "I walk therefore I am," he is initiating the 

distinction between the two subjects (what still-Cartesian contemporary 

linguists call a shifter, even though they find traces of the second subject in 

the first). 

3.  Nineteenth-century psychiatry: monomania distinguished from 

mania; subjective delusion separated from ideational delusions; "posses-

sion" replacing sorcery; a slow elaboration of passional delusion, as dis-

tinct from paranoia ... The schema of passional delusion according to 

Clerambault is as follows: the Postulate as the point of subjectification 
(He  loves me); pride as the tonality of the subject of enunciation (de-

lusional pursuit of the loved one); Spite, Rancor (a result of a reversion to 

the subject of the statement). Passional delusion is a veritable cogito. In the 

foregoing example of erotomania, as well as in jealousy and querulous 

delusion, Clerambault stresses that a sign must follow a segment or linear 

proceeding through to the end before it can begin another, whereas the 

signs in paranoid delusion form an endless, self-adjusting network devel-

oping in all directions. The cogito also follows a linear temporal proceed-

ing needing to be recommenced. The history of the Jews is punctuated by 

catastrophes after each of which there were just enough survivors to start 

a new proceeding. In the course of a proceeding, while there is linear 

movement the plural is often used, whereas there is a return to the Singu-

lar as soon as there is a pause or stoppage marking the end of one move-

ment before another begins.

24

 Fundamental segmentarity: one proceeding 

must end (and its termination must be marked) before another begins, to 

enable another to begin. 

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The point of subj edification is the origin of the passional line of the 

postsignifying regime. The point of subjectification can be anything. It 

must only display the following characteristic traits of the subjective 

semiotic: the double turning away, betrayal, and existence under reprieve. 

For anorexics, food plays this role (anorexics do not confront death but 

save themselves by betraying food, which is equally a traitor since it is sus-

pected of containing larvae, worms, and microbes). A dress, an article of 

underwear, a shoe are points of subjectification for a fetishist. So is a 

faciality trait for someone in love, but the meaning of faciality has 

changed; it is no longer the body of the signifier but has become the point 

of departure for a deterritorialization that puts everything else to flight. A 

thing, an animal, will do the trick. There are cogitos on everything. "A 

pair of eyes set far apart, a head hewn of quartz, a haunch that seemed to 

live its own life.... Whenever the beauty of the female becomes irresisti-

ble, it is traceable to a single quality":

25

 a point of subjectification in the 

departure of a passional line. Moreover, several points coexist in a given 

individual or group, which are always engaged in several distinct and not 

always compatible linear proceedings. The various forms of education or 

"normalization" imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her 

change points of subjectification, always moving toward a higher, nobler 

one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of 

subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental 

reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation 

issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to 

statements in conformity with a dominant reality (of which the mental 

reality just mentioned is a part, even when it seems to oppose it). What is 

important, what makes the postsignifying passional line a line of subjecti-

fication or subjection, is the constitution, the doubling of the two sub-

jects, and the recoiling of one into the other, of the subject of enunciation 

into the subject of the statement (the linguists acknowledge this when 

they speak of the "imprint of the process of enunciation in the state-

ment"). Signifiance brought about uniformity in the substance of enunci-

ation; now subjectivity effects an individuation, collective or particular. 

Substance has become subject, as they say. The subject of enunciation 
recoils into the subject of the statement, to the point that the subject of the 
statement resupplies subject of enunciation for another proceeding. 
The 

subject of the statement has become the "respondent" or guarantor of the 

subject of enunciation, through a kind of reductive echolalia, in a 

biunivocal relation. This relation, this recoiling, is also that of mental 

reality into the dominant reality. There is always an appeal to a dominant 

reality that functions from within (already in the Old Testament, and dur-

ing the Reformation, with trade and capitalism). There is no longer even a

 

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need for a transcendent center of power; power is instead immanent and 

melds with the "real," operating through normalization. A strange inven-

tion: as if in one form the doubled subject were the causeof the statements 

of which, in its other form, it itself is a part. This is the paradox of the 

legislator-subject replacing the signifying despot: the more you obey the 

statements of the dominant reality, the more in command you are as sub-

ject of enunciation in mental reality, for in the end you are only obeying 

yourself! You are the one in command, in your capacity as a rational 

being. A new form of slavery is invented, namely, being slave to oneself, or 

to pure "reason," the Cogito. Is there anything more passional than pure 

reason? Is there a colder, more extreme, more self-interested passion than 

the Cogito?

 

Althusser clearly brings out this constitution of social individuals as 

subjects: he calls it interpellation ("Hey you, over there!") and calls the 

point of subjectification the Absolute Subject; he analyzes the "specular 

doubling" of subjects and for purposes of demonstration uses the example 

of God, Moses, and the Jewish people.

26

 Linguists like Benveniste adopt a 

curious linguistic personology that is very close to the Cogito: the You, 

which can doubtless designate the person one is addressing, but more 

importantly, a point of subjectification on the basis of which each of us is 

constituted as a subject. The /as subject of enunciation, designating the 

person that utters and reflects its own use in the statement ("the empty 

nonreferential sign"); this is the I appearing in propositions of the type "I 

believe, I assume, I think..." Finally, the I as subject of the statement, 

indicating a state for which a She or He could always be substituted ("I suf-

fer, I walk, I breathe, I feel.. .").

27

 This is not, however, a question of a lin-

guistic operation, for a subject is never the condition of possibility of 

language or the cause of the statement: there is no subject, only collective 

assemblages of enunciation. Subjectification is simply one such assem-

blage and designates a formalization of expression or a regime of signs 

rather than a condition internal to language. Neither is it a question of a 

movement characteristic of ideology, as Althusser says: subjectification as 

a regime of signs or a form of expression is tied to an assemblage, in other 

words, an organization of power that is already fully functioning in the 

economy, rather than superposing itself upon contents or relations 

between contents determined as real in the last instance. Capital is a point 

of subjectification par excellence.

 

The psychoanalytic cogito: the psychoanalyst presents him- or herself as 

an ideal point of subjectification that brings the patient to abandon old, 

so-called neurotic, points. The patient is partially a subject of enunciation 

in all he or she says to the psychoanalyst, and under the artificial mental 

conditions of the session: the patient is therefore called the "analysand."

 

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But in everything else the patient says or does, he or she is a subject of the 

statement, eternally psychoanalyzed, going from one linear proceeding to 

another, perhaps even changing analysts, growing increasingly submissive 

to the normalization of a dominant reality. In this sense, psychoanalysis, 

with its mixed semiotic, fully participates in a line of subjectification. The 

psychoanalyst does not even have to speak anymore, the analysand 

assumes the burden of interpretation; as for the psychoanalyzed patient, 

the more he or she thinks about "his" or "her" next session, or the preced-

ing one, in segments, the better a subject he or she is.

 

Just as the paranoid regime had two axes—one sign referring to another 

(making the sign a signifier), and the signifier referring to the signified—so 

too the passional regime, the line of subjectification, has two axes, one 

syntagmatic and the other paradigmatic: as we have just seen, the first axis 

is consciousness. Consciousness as passion is precisely that doubling of 

subjects, of the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement, and 

the recoiling of one into the other. But the second form of subjectification 

is love as passion, love-passion, another type of double, of doubling and 

recoiling. Here again, a variable point of subjectification serves to distrib-

ute two subjects that as much conceal their faces as reveal them to each 

other, that wed a line of flight, a line of deterritorialization forever drawing 

them together and driving them apart. But everything changes: there is a 

celibate side to this doubled consciousness, and there is a passional love 

couple that no longer has any use for consciousness or reason. Yet it is the 

same regime, even in betrayal and even if the betraying is done by a third 

party. Adam and Eve, and Cain's wife (about whom the Bible should have 

said more). Richard III, the traitor, is in the end given consciousness in a 

dream, but only the strange face-off with Lady Anne, a meeting of two 

countenances that conceal themselves knowing that they have promised 

themselves to each other following the same line that will nonetheless sepa-

rate them. The most loyal and tender, or intense, love assigns subject of 

enunciation and a subject of the statement that constantly switch places, 

wrapped in the sweetness of being a naked statement in the other's mouth, 

and of the other's being a naked enunciation in my own mouth. But there is 

always a traitor in the making. What love is not betrayed? What cogito lacks 

its evil genius, the traitor it will never be rid of? "Tristan . . . Isolde . . . 

Isolde.. . Tristan": the cry of the two subjects climbs the scale of intensities 

until it reaches the summit of a suffocating consciousness, whereas the ship 

follows the line of the waters, the line of death and the unconscious, 

betrayal, a continuous melody line. Passional love is a cogito built for two, 

just as the cogito is a passion for the self alone. There is a potential couple in 

the cogito, just as there is a doubling of a single virtual subject in 

love-passion. Klossowski has created the strangest figures on the basis of 

this

 

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complementarity between an over intense thought and an over feverish 

couple. The line of subjectification is thus entirely occupied by the Double, 

but it has two figures since there are two kinds of doubles: the syntagmatic 

figure of consciousness, or the consciousness-related double, relating to 

form (Self = Self [Moi = Moi]); and the paradigmatic figure of the couple, 

or the passional double, relating to substance (Man = Woman; here, the 

double is immediately the difference between the sexes).

 

We can follow the becoming of these doubles in mixed semiotics, which 

are interminglings as well as degradations. On the one hand, the passional 

love double, the couple in love-passion, falls into a conjugal relation or 

even a "domestic squabble" situation: Which is the subject of enunciation? 

Which is the subject of the statement? The battle of the sexes: You 're steal-
ing my thoughts. 
The domestic squabble has always been a cogito for two, a 

war cogito. Strindberg took this fall of love-passion into despotic conju-

gality and hysterico-paranoid squabbling to its extreme ("she" says she 

found it all by herself when in fact she owes it all to me, echo, thought theft, 

O Strindberg!).

28

 On the other hand, the consciousness-related double of 

pure thought, the couple of the legislating subject, falls into a bureaucratic 

relation and a new form of persecution in which one double takes over the 

role of subject of enunciation while the other is reduced to a subject of the 

statement; the cogito itself becomes an "office squabble," a bureaucratic 

love delusion. A new form of bureaucracy replaces or conjugates with the 

old imperial bureaucracy, the bureaucrat says / think (Kafka goes the fur-

thest in this direction, as in the example of Sortini and Sordini in The Cas-
tle,  
or the many subjectifications of Klamm).

29

 Conjugality is the 

development of the couple, and bureaucracy the development of the 

cogito. But one is contained in the other: amorous bureaucracy, bureau-

cratic couple. Too much has been written on the double, haphazardly, 

metaphysically, finding it everywhere, in any old mirror, without noticing 

the specific regime it possesses both in a mixed semiotic where it intro-

duces new phases, and in the pure semiotic of subjectification where it 

inscribes itself on a line of flight and introduces very particular figures. 

Once again: the two figures of thought-consciousness and love-passion in 

the postsignifying regime; the two moments of bureaucratic consciousness 

and conjugal relation in the mixed fall or combination. But even in a mixed 

state, the original line is easily discovered by semiotic analysis.

 

There is a redundancy of consciousness and love that is not the same as 

the signifying redundancy of the other regime. In the signifying regime, 

redundancy is a phenomenon of objective frequency involving signs or ele-

ments of signs (the phonemes, letters, and groups of letters in a language): 

there is both a maximum frequency of the signifier in relation to each sign, 

and a comparative frequency of one sign in relation to another. In any case,

 

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it could be said that this regime develops a kind of "wall" on which signs are 

inscribed, in relation to one another and in relation to the signifier. In the 

postsignifying regime, on the other hand, the redundancy is one of subjec-
tive resonance 
involving above all shifters, personal pronouns and proper 

names. Here again, we may distinguish between the maximum resonance 

of self-consciousness (Self = Self [Moi Moi]) and a comparative reso-

nance of names (Tristan ... Isolde ...). This time, however, there is no 

longer a wall upon which the frequency is tallied but instead a black hole 

attracting consciousness and passion and in which they resonate. Tristan 

calls Isolde, Isolde calls Tristan, both drawn toward the black hole of a 

self-consciousness, carried by the tide toward death. When the linguists 

distinguish between two forms of redundancy, frequency and resonance, 

they often ascribe the latter a merely derivative status.

30

 In fact, it is a 

question of two semiotics that mix but retain their own distinct principles 

(similarly, one could define other forms of redundancy, such as rhythmic, 

gestural, or numerical, relating to the other regimes of signs). The most 

essential distinction between the signifying regime and the subjective 

regime and their respective redundancies is the movement of 
deterritorialization 
they effectuate. Since the signifying sign refers only to 

other signs, and the set of all signs to the signifier itself, the corresponding 

semiotic enjoys a high level of deterritorialization; but it is a 

deterritorialization that is still relative,  expressed as frequency. In this 

system, the line of flight remains negative, it is assigned a negative sign. 

As we have seen, the subjective regime proceeds entirely differently: 

precisely because the sign breaks its relation of signifiance with other 

signs and sets off racing down a positive line of flight, it attains an 
absolute deterritorialization expressed in the black hole of consciousness 

and passion. The absolute deterritorialization of the cogito. That is why 

subjective redundancy seems both to graft itself onto signifying 

redundancy and to derive from it, as second-degree redundancy.

 

Things are even more complicated than we have let on. Subjectification 

assigns the line of flight a positive sign, it carries deterritorialization to the 

absolute, intensity to the highest degree, redundancy to a reflexive form, 

etc. But it has its own way of repudiating the positivity it frees, or of 

relativizing the absoluteness it attains, without, however, falling back to 

the preceding regime. In this redundancy of resonance, the absolute of con-

sciousness is the absolute of impotence and the intensity of passion, the 

heat of the void. This is because subjectification essentially constitutes 

finite linear proceedings, one of which ends before the next begins: thus the 

cogito is always recommenced, a passion or grievance is always recapitu-

lated. Every consciousness pursues its own death, every love-passion its 

own end, attracted by a black hole, and all the black holes resonate together.

 

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Thus subjectification imposes on the line of flight a segmentarity that is 

forever repudiating that line, and upon absolute deterritorialization a 

point of abolition that is forever blocking that deterritorialization or 

diverting it. The reason for this is simple: forms of expression and regimes 

of signs are still strata (even considered in themselves, after abstracting 

forms of content); subjectification is no less a stratum than signifiance.

 

The principal strata binding human beings are the organism, signifiance 

and interpretation, and subjectification and subjection. These strata to-

gether are what separates us from the plane of consistency and the abstract 

machine, where there is no longer any regime of signs, where the line of 

flight effectuates its own potential positivity and deterritorialization its 

absolute power. The problem, from this standpoint, is to tip the most favor-

able assemblage from its side facing the strata to its side facing the plane of 

consistency or the body without organs. Subjectification carries desire to 

such a point of excess and unloosening that it must either annihilate itself 

in a black hole or change planes. Destratify, open up to a new function, a 
diagrammatic function. Let consciousness cease to be its own double, and 

passion the double of one person for another. Make consciousness an 

experimentation in life, and passion a field of continuous intensities, an 

emission of particles-signs. Make the body without organs of conscious-

ness and love. Use love and consciousness to abolish subjectification: "To 

become the great lover, the magnetizer and catalyzer ... one has to first 

experience the profound wisdom of being an utter fool."

31

 Use the / think 

for a becoming-animal, and love for a becoming-woman of man. 

Desub-jectify consciousness and passion. Are there not diagrammatic 

redundancies distinct from both signifying redundancies and subjective 

redundancies? Redundancies that would no longer be knots of 

arborescence but resumptions and upsurges in a rhizome? Stammer 

language, be a foreigner in one's own tongue:

 

do domi not passi do not dominate

 

do not dominate your passive passions not

 

do devouring not not dominate

 

your rats your rations your rats rations not not. . .

32

 

It seems necessary to distinguish between three types of deterrito-
rialization: the first type is relative, proper to the strata, and culminates in 
signifiance; the second is absolute, but still negative and stratic, and 
appears in subjectification {Ratio et Passio); finally, there is the possibility 
of a positive absolute deterritorialization on the plane of consistency or the 
body without organs.

 

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587 B.c.-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS □ 135

 

We have not, of course, managed to eliminate forms of content (for 

example, the role of the Temple, or the position of a dominant Reality, 
etc.). What we have done is to isolate, under artificial conditions, a certain 
number of semiotics displaying very diverse characteristics. The 
presigni-fying semiotic, in which the "overcoding" marking the privileged 
status of language operates diffusely: enunciation is collective, statements 
themselves are polyvocal, and substances of expression are multiple; 
relative deterritorialization is determined by the confrontation between 
the territorialities and segmentary lineages that ward off the State 
apparatus. The signifying semiotic: overcoding is fully effectuated by the 
signifier, and by the State apparatus that emits it; there is uniformity of 
enunciation, unification of the substance of expression, and control over 
statements in a regime of circularity; relative deterritorialization is taken as 
far as it can go by a redundant and perpetual referral from sign to sign. 
The  countersig-nifying semiotic: here, overcoding is assured by the 
Number as form of expression or enunciation, and by the War Machine 
upon which it depends; deterritorialization follows a line of active 
destruction or abolition. The postsignifying semiotic, in which overcoding 
is assured by the redundancy of consciousness; a subjectification of 
enunciation occurs on a passional line that makes the organization of 
power  (pouvoir)  immanent and raises deterritorialization to the absolute, 
although in a way that is still negative.

 

 

(1) The Center or the Signifier; the faciality of the god or despot. (2) The Temple or Pal-
ace, with priests and bureaucrats. (3) The organization in circles and the sign referring 
to other signs on the same circle or on different circles. (4) The interpretive develop-
ment of signifier into signified, which then reimparts signifier. (5) The expiatory ani-
mal; the blocking of the line of flight. (6) The scapegoat, or the negative sign of the line 
of flight.

 

 

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Yet we must consider two aspects: on the one hand, these semiotics are 

still concrete even after forms of content have been abstracted, but only to 

the extent that they are mixed, that they constitute mixed combinations. 

Every semiotic is mixed and only functions as such; each one necessarily 

captures fragments of one or more other semiotics (surplus value of code). 

Even from this perspective, the signifying semiotic has no privileged status 

to apply toward the formation of a general semiology: in particular, the way 

in which it combines with the passional semiotic of subjectification ("the 

signifier for the subject") implies nothing that would privilege it over other 

combinations, for example, the combination of the passional semiotic and 

the countersignifying semiotic, or of the countersignifying semiotic and 

the signifying semiotic itself (when the Nomads turn imperial), etc. There 

is no general semiology.

 

For example, without privileging one regime over another, it is possible 

to construct schemas of the signifying and postsignifying semiotics that 

clearly illustrate the possibilities for concrete mixture.

 

The second aspect, complementary but very different, consists in the 

possibility of transforming one abstract or pure semiotic into another, by 

virtue of the translatability ensuing from overcoding as the special charac-

teristic of language. This time, it is no longer a question of concrete mixed 

semiotics but of transformations of one abstract semiotic into another 

(even though that transformation is not itself abstract, in other words, 

effectively takes place without being performed by a "translator" in the 

role of pure knower). All transformations taking a given semiotic into the 

presignifying regime may be called analogical transformations; those that 

take it into the signifying regime are symbolic; into the countersignifying 

regime, polemical or strategic; into the postsignifying regime, conscious-
ness-related or mimetic; 
finally, transformations that blow apart semiotics 

systems or regimes of signs on the plane of consistency of a positive abso-

lute deterritorialization are called diagrammatic. A transformation is not 

the same thing as a statement in a pure semiotic; nor even an ambiguous 

statement requiring a whole pragmatic analysis to determine the semiotic 

it belongs to; nor a statement belonging to a mixed semiotic (although the 

transformation may have that effect). A transformational statement marks 

the way in which a semiotic translates for its own purposes a statement 

originating elsewhere, and in so doing diverts it, leaving untransformable 

residues and actively resisting the inverse transformation. Furthermore, 

transformations are not limited to the ones we just listed. It is always 

through transformation that a new semiotic is created in its own right. 

Translations can be creative. New pure regimes of signs are formed through 

transformation and translation. Again, there is no general semiology but 

rather a transsemiotic.

 

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(1) The point of subjectification, replacing the center of signfiance. (2) The two faces 

turned away from each other. (3) The subject of enunciation resulting from the point of 

subjectification and the turning away. (4) The subject of the statement, into which the 

subject of enunciation recoils. (5) The succession of finite linear proceedings accompa-

nied by a new form of priest and a new bureaucracy. (6) The line of flight, which is freed 

but still segmented, remaining negative and blocked.

 

In analogical transformations, we often see sleep, drugs, and amorous 

rapture form expressions that translate into presignifying regimes the sub-

jective or signifying regimes one wishes to impose upon the expressions, 

but which they resist by themselves imposing upon these regimes an unex-

pected segmentarity and polyvocality. Christianity underwent strange cre-

ative translations in its transmission to "barbarian" or even "savage" 

peoples. The introduction of monetary signs into certain commercial cir-

cuits in Africa caused those signs to undergo an analogical transformation 

that was very difficult to control (except when the circuits underwent a 

destructive transformation instead).

33

 The songs of black Americans, 

including, especially, the words, would be a better example, since they 

show how the slaves "translated" the English signifier and made presig-

nifying or even countersignifying use of the language, blending it with their 

own African languages just as they blended old African work songs with 

their new forced labor; these songs also show how, with Christianization 

and the abolition of slavery, the slaves underwent a proceeding of 

"subjectification" or even "individuation" that transformed their music, 

while the music simultaneously transformed the proceeding by analogy; 

and also how unique problems of "faciality" were posed when whites in 

"blackface" appropriated the words and songs and blacks responded by 

darkening their faces another hue, taking back their dances and songs, even 

transforming or translating those of the whites.

34

 Of course, the crudest 

and most visible transformations were in the other direction: the symbolic 

translations occurring when the signifier takes power. The preceding exam-

ples concerning monetary signs and rhythmic regimes can be repeated in 

the opposite direction. The passage from an African dance to a white dance

 

587 B.c.-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS □ 137

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often exhibits a consciousness-related or mimetic translation, accompa-

nied by a power takeover by signifiance and subjectification. ("In Africa 

the dance is impersonal, sacred and obscene. When the phallus becomes 

erect and is handled like a banana it is not a 'personal hard-on' we see but a 

tribal erection. ... The hoochie-koochie dancer of the big city dances 

alone—a fact of staggering significance. The law forbids response, forbids 

participation. Nothing is left of the primitive rite but the 'suggestive' 

movements of the body. What they suggest varies with the individual 

observer.")

35

 

It is not simply linguistic, lexical, or even syntactic transformations that 

determine the importance of a true semiotic translation but the opposite. 

Crazy talk is not enough. In each case we must judge whether what we see 

is an adaptation of an old semiotic, a new variety of a particular mixed 

semiotic, or the process of creation of an as yet unknown regime. For exam-

ple, it is relatively easy to stop saying "I," but that does not mean that you 

have gotten away from the regime of subjectification; conversely, you can 

keep on saying "I," just for kicks, and already be in another regime in which 

personal pronouns function only as fictions. Signifiance and interpretation 

are so thick-skinned, they form such a sticky mixture with sub-

jectification, that it is easy to believe that you are outside them when you 

are in fact still secreting them. People sometimes denounce interpretation 

yet show so signifying a face that they simultaneously impose interpreta-

tion upon the subject, which continues to nourish itself on it in order to sur-

vive. Who can really believe that psychoanalysis is capable of changing a 

semiotic amassing every deception? The only change there has been is a 

role switch. Instead of a patient who signifies and a psychoanalyst who 

interprets, we now have a signifying analyst and it is the patient who does 

all the interpreting. In the antipsychiatric experiment of Kingsley Hall, 

Mary Barnes, a former nurse turned "schizophrenic," embraces the new 

semiotic of the Voyage, only to arrogate to herself a veritable power in the 

community and reintroduce as a collective delusion the worst kind of psy-

choanalytic regime of interpretation ("She interpreted everything that was 

done for her, or for anyone else for that matter. . .").

36

 A highly stratified 

semiotic is difficult to get away from. Even a presignifying, or 

counter-signifying, semiotic, even an asignifying diagram, harbors knots of 

coincidence just waiting to form virtual centers of signifiance and points 

of subjectification. Of course, an operation of translation is not easy when 

it is a question of destroying a dominant atmospheric semiotic. One of the 

things of profound interest in Castaneda's books, under the influence of 

drugs, or other things, and of a change of atmosphere, is precisely that they 

show how the Indian manages to combat the mechanisms of interpretation 

and instill in the disciple a presignifying semiotic, or even an asignifying

 

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diagram: Stop! You're making me tired! Experiment, don't signify and 

interpret! Find your own places, territorialities, deterritorializations, 

regime, lines of flight! Semiotize yourself instead of rooting around in your 

prefab childhood and Western semiology. "Don Juan stated that in order 

to arrive at 'seeing' one first had to 'stop the world.' 'Stopping the world' 

was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which 

the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, 

which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circum-

stances alien to the flow."

37

 In short, a true semiotic transformation 

appeals to all kinds of variables, not only external ones, but also variables 

implicit to language, internal to statements.

 

Pragmatics, then, already displays two components. The first could be 

called generative since it shows how the various abstract regimes form con-

crete mixed semiotics, with what variants, how they combine, and which 

one is predominant. The second is the transformational component, which 

shows how these regimes of signs are translated into each other, especially 

when there is a creation of a new regime. Generative pragmatics makes 

tracings of mixed semiotics; transformational pragmatics makes maps of 

transformations. Although a mixed semiotic does not necessarily imply 

effective creativity, and may content itself with combinatory possibilities 

without veritable transformation, it is still the transformational compo-

nent that accounts for the originality of a regime as well as for the novelty of 

the mixes it enters at a given moment in a given domain. This second com-

ponent is therefore the more profound, and it is the only means of measur-

ing the elements of the first component.

38

 For example, we may ask when 

statements of the Bolshevik type first appeared, and how Leninism, at the 

time of the break with the social democrats, effected a veritable transfor-

mation that created an original semiotic, even if its fall into the mixed 

semiotic of Stalinist organization was inevitable. In an exemplary study, 

Jean-Pierre Faye did a detailed analysis of the transformations that pro-

duced Nazism, viewed as a system of new statements in a given social field. 

At what moment is a regime of signs established, and in what domain? 

Throughout an entire people? In a fraction of that people? In a more or less 

localizable margin inside a psychiatric hospital? (For as we have seen we 

can find a semiotic of subjectification in the ancient history of the Jews, 

but also in psychiatric diagnosis in the nineteenth century, with, of course, 

profound variations and even veritable transformations in the correspond-

ing semiotic.) All of these questions fall within the purview of pragmatics. 

There is no question that the most profound transformations and transla-

tions of our time are not occurring in Europe. Pragmatics should reject the 

idea of an invariant immune from transformation, even if it is the in-

variant of a dominant "grammaticality." For language is a political affair

 

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before it is an affair for linguistics; even the evaluation of degrees of 

gram-maticality is a political matter.

 

What is a semiotic, in other words, a regime of signs or a formalization 

of expression? They are simultaneously more and less than language. 

Language as a whole is defined by "superlinearity," its condition of possi-

bility; individual languages are defined by constants, elements, and rela-

tions of a phonological, syntactical, and semantic nature. Doubtless, 

every regime of signs effectuates the condition of possibility of language 

and utilizes language elements, but that is all. No regime can be identical 

to that condition of possibility, and no regime has the property of con-

stants. As Foucault clearly shows, regimes of signs are only functions of 
existence 
of language that sometimes span a number of languages and are 

sometimes distributed within a single language; they coincide neither 

with a structure nor with units of a given order, but rather intersect them 

and cause them to appear in space and time. This is the sense in which 

regimes of signs are assemblages of enunciation, which cannot be ade-

quately accounted for by any linguistic category: what makes a proposi-
tion or even a single word a "statement" 
pertains to implicit presupposi-

tions that cannot be made explicit, that mobilize pragmatic variables 

proper to enunciation (incorporeal transformations). This precludes 

explaining an assemblage in terms of the signifier or the subject, because 

both pertain to variables of enunciation within the assemblage. It is 

signifiance and subjectification that presuppose the assemblage, not the 

reverse. The names we gave to the regimes of signs ("presignifying," "sig-

nifying," "countersignifying," "postsignifying") would remain evolution-

ist if heterogeneous functions or varieties of assemblages did not 

effectively correspond to them (segmentarization, signifiance and inter-

pretation, numeration, subjectification). Regimes of signs are thus defined 

by variables that are internal to enunciation but remain external to the 

constants of language and irreducible to linguistic categories.

 

But at this point, everything turns around, and the reasons why a regime 

of signs is less than language also become the reasons why it is more than 

language. Only one side of the assemblage has to do with enunciation or 

formalizes expression; on its other side, inseparable from the first, it for-

malizes contents, it is a machinic assemblage or an assemblage of bodies. 

Now contents are not "signifieds" dependent upon a signifier in any way, 

nor are they "objects" in any kind of relation of causality with the subject. 

They have their own formalization and have no relation of symbolic corre-

spondence or linear causality with the form of expression: the two forms 

are in reciprocal presupposition, and they can be abstracted from each 

other only in a very relative way because they are two sides of a single 

assemblage. We must therefore arrive at something in the assemblage itself

 

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that is still more profound than these sides and can account for both of the 

forms in presupposition, forms of expression or regimes of signs (semiotic 

systems) and forms of content or regimes of bodies (physical systems). This 

is what we call the abstract machine, which constitutes and conjugates all of 

the assemblage's cutting edges of deterritorialization.

39

 We must say that 

the abstract machine is necessarily "much more" than language. When lin-

guists (following Chomsky) rise to the idea of a purely language-based 

abstract machine, our immediate objection is that their machine, far from 

being too abstract, is not abstract enough because it is limited to the form of 

expression and to alleged uni versals that presuppose language. Abstracting 

content is an operation that appears all the more relative and inadequate 

when seen from the viewpoint of abstraction itself. A true abstract machine 

has no way of making a distinction within itself between a plane of expres-

sion and a plane of content because it draws a single plane of consistency, 

which in turn formalizes contents and expressions according to strata and 

reterritorializations. The abstract machine in itself is destratified, 

deter-ritorialized; it has no form of its own (much less substance) and 

makes no distinction within itself between content and expression, even 

though outside itself it presides over that distinction and distributes it in 

strata, domains, and territories. An abstract machine in itself is not 

physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it 

knows nothing of the distinction between the artificial and the natural 

either). It operates by matter, not by substance; by function, not by form. 

Substances and forms are of expression "or" of content. But functions are 

not yet "semiotically" formed, and matters are not yet "physically" 

formed. The abstract machine is pure Matter-Function—a diagram 

independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will 

distribute.

 

We define the abstract machine as the aspect or moment at which noth-

ing but functions and matters remain. A diagram has neither substance nor 

form, neither content nor expression.

40

 Substance is a formed matter, and 

matter is a substance that is unformed either physically or semiotically. 

Whereas expression and content have distinct forms, are really distinct 

from each other, function has only "traits," of content and of expression, 

between which it establishes a connection: it is no longer even possible to 

tell whether it is a particle or a sign. A matter-content having only degrees 

of intensity, resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed, or tardi-

ness; and a function-expression having only "tensors," as in a system of 

mathematical, or musical, writing. Writing now functions on the same 

level as the real, and the real materially writes. The diagram retains the 

most deterritorialized content and the most deterritorialized expression, 

in order to conjugate them. Maximum deterritorialization sometimes 

starts from a trait of content and sometimes from a trait of expression; that

 

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trait is said to be "deterritorializing" in relation to the other precisely 

because it diagrams it, carries it off, raises it to its own power. The most 

deterritorialized element causes the other element to cross a threshold ena-

bling a conjunction of their respective deterritorializations, a shared accel-

eration. This is the abstract machine's absolute, positive 

deterritoria-lization. That is why diagrams  must be distinguished from 
indexes, which are territorial signs, but also from icons, which pertain to 

reterrito-rialization, and from symbols,  which pertain to relative or 

negative deterri-torialization.

41

 Defined diagrammatically in this way, an 

abstract machine is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last 

instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme 

instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract 

machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather 

constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. Thus when it 

constitutes points of creation or potentiality it does not stand outside 

history but is instead always "prior to" history. Everything escapes, 

everything creates—never alone, but through an abstract machine that 

produces continuums of intensity, effects conjunctions of 

deterritorialization, and extracts expressions and contents. This 

Real-Abstract is totally different from the fictitious abstraction of a 

supposedly pure machine of expression. It is an Absolute, but one that is 

neither undifferentiated nor transcendent. Abstract machines thus have 

proper names (as well as dates), which of course designate not persons or 

subjects but matters and functions. The name of a musician or scientist is 

used in the same way as a painter's name designates a color, nuance, tone, or 

intensity: it is always a question of a conjunction of Matter and Function. 

The double deterritorialization of the voice and the instrument is marked 

by a Wagner abstract machine, a Webern abstract machine, etc. In physics 

and mathematics, we may speak of a Riemann abstract machine, and in 

algebra of a Galois abstract machine (defined precisely by an arbitrary 

line, called the adjunctive line, which conjugates with a body taken as a 

starting point), etc. There is a diagram whenever a singular abstract 

machine functions directly in a matter.

 

Strictly speaking, therefore, there are no regimes of signs on the dia-

grammatic level, or on the plane of consistency, because form of expression 

is no longer really distinct from form of content. The diagram knows only 

traits and cutting edges that are still elements of content insofar as they are 

material and of expression insofar as they are functional, but which draw 

one another along, form relays, and meld in a shared deterritorialization: 

particles-signs. There is nothing surprising in this, for the real distinction 

between form of expression and form of content appears only with the 

strata, and is different on each one. It is on the strata that the double articu-

lation appears that formalizes traits of expression and traits of content,

 

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each in its own right, turning matters into physically or semiotically 

formed substances and functions into forms of expression or content. 

Expression then constitutes indexes, icons, or symbols that enter regimes 

or semiotic systems. Content then constitutes bodies, things, or objects 

that enter physical systems, organisms, and organizations. The deeper 

movement for conjugating matter and function—absolute 

deterri-torialization, identical to the earth itself—appears only in the form 

of respective territorialities, negative or relative deterritorializations, and 

complementary reterritorializations. All of this culminates in a language 

stratum that installs an abstract machine on the level of expression and 

takes the abstraction of content even further, tending to strip it of any form 

of its own (the imperialism of language, the pretensions to a general 

semiology). In short, the strata substantialize diagrammatic matters and 

separate a formed plane of content from a formed plane of expression. 

They hold expressions and contents, separately substantialized and forma-

lized, in the pincers of a double articulation assuring their independence 

and real distinction and enthroning a dualism that endlessly reproduces 

and redivides. They shatter the continuums of intensity, introducing 

breaks between different strata and within each stratum. They prevent 

conjunctions of flight from forming and crush the cutting edges of 

deterri-torialization, either by effecting reterritorializations that make 

these movements merely relative, or by assigning certain of the lines an 

entirely negative value, or again by segmenting them, blocking them, 

plugging them, or plunging them into a kind of black hole.

 

Above all, diagrammaticism should not be confused with an operation 

of the axiomatic type. Far from drawing creative lines of flight and conju-

gating traits of positive deterritorialization, axiomatics blocks all lines, 

subordinates them to a punctual system, and halts the geometric and alge-

braic writing systems that had begun to run off in all directions. This hap-

pened in relation to the question of indeterminism in physics: a "reorder-

ing" was undertaken to reconcile it with physical determinism. Mathemat-

ical writing systems were axiomatized, in other words, restratified, 

resemiotized, and material flows were rephysicalized. It is as much a politi-

cal as a scientific affair: science must not go crazy. Hilbert and de Broglie 

were as much politicians as scientists: they reestablished order. An 

axiomatization, a semiotization, a physicalization, is not a diagram but in 

fact the opposite of a diagram. The program of a stratum, against the dia-

gram of the plane of consistency. This does not, however, preclude the 

diagram's heading back down the road to escape and scattering new, singu-

lar abstract machines (the mathematical creation of improbable functions 

was carried out in opposition to axiomatization, and the material inven-

tion of unfindable particles in opposition to physicalization). Science as

 

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70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

 

such is like everything else; madness is as intrinsic to it as reorderings. The 

same scientists may participate in both aspects, having their own madness, 

police, signifiances, or subjectifications, as well as their own abstract 

machines, all in their capacity as scientists. The phrase "the politics of sci-

ence" is a good designation for these currents, which are internal to science 

and not simply circumstances and State factors that act upon it from the 

outside, leading it to make as atomic bomb here and embark upon a space 

program there. These political influences or determinations would not 

exist if science itself did not have its own poles, oscillations, strata, and 

destratifications, its own lines of flight and reorderings, in short, the more 

or less potential events of its own politics, its own particular "polemics," its 

own internal war machine (of which thwarted, persecuted, or hindered sci-

entists are historically a part). It is not enough to say that axiomatics does 

not take invention and creation into account: it possesses a deliberate will 

to halt or stabilize the diagram, to take its place by lodging itself on a level 

of coagulated abstraction too large for the concrete but too small for the 

real. We will see in what sense this is the "capitalist" level.

 

We cannot, however, content ourselves with a dualism between the 

plane of consistency and its diagrams and abstract machines on the one 

hand, and the strata and their programs and concrete assemblages on the 

other. Abstract machines do not exist only on the plane of consistency, 

upon which they develop diagrams; they are already present enveloped or 

"encasted" in the strata in general, or even erected on particular strata 

upon which they simultaneously organize a form of expression and a form 

of content. What is illusory in the second case is the idea of an exclusively 

expressive or language-based abstract machine, not the idea of an abstract 

machine internal to the stratum and accounting for the relativity of those 

two distinct forms. Thus there are two complementary movements, one by 

which abstract machines work the strata and are constantly setting things 

loose, another by which they are effectively stratified, effectively captured 

by the strata. On the one hand, strata could never organize themselves if 

they did not harness diagrammatic matters or functions and formalize 

them from the standpoint of both expression and content; every regime of 

signs, and even signifiance and subjectification, is still a diagrammatic 

effect (although relativized and negativized). One the other hand, abstract 

machines would never be present, even on the strata, if they did not have 

the power or potentiality to extract and accelerate destratified 

particles-signs (the passage to the absolute). Consistency is neither 

totalizing nor structuring; rather, it is deterritorializing (a biological 

stratum, for example, evolves not according to statistical phenomena but 

rather according to cutting edges of deterritorialization). The security, 

tranquillity, and ho-meostatic equilibrium of the strata are thus never 

completely guaranteed:

 

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to regain a plane of consistency that inserts itself into the most diverse sys-

tems of stratification and jumps from one to the other, it suffices to prolong 

the lines of flight working the strata, to connect the dots, to conjugate the 

processes of deterritorialization. We have seen that signifiance and inter-

pretation, consciousness and passion, can prolong themselves following 

these lines, and at the same time open out onto a properly diagrammatic 

experience. All of these states or modes of the abstract machine coexist in 

what we call the machinic assemblage. The assemblage has two poles or 

vectors: one vector is oriented toward the strata, upon which it distributes 

territorialities, relative deterritorializations, and reterritorializations; the 

other is oriented toward the plane of consistency or destratification, upon 

which it conjugates processes of deterritorialization, carrying them to the 

absolute of the earth. It is along its stratic vector that the assemblage differ-

entiates a form of expression (from the standpoint of which it appears as a 

collective assemblage of enunciation) from a form of content (from the 

standpoint of which it appears as a machinic assemblage of bodies); it fits 

one form to the other, one manifestation to the other, placing them in recip-

rocal presupposition. But along its diagrammatic or destratified vector, it 

no longer has two sides; all it retains are traits of expression and content 

from which it extracts degrees of deterritorialization that add together and 

cutting edges that conjugate.

 

A regime of signs has more than just two components. It has, in fact, four 

of them, which form the object of Pragmatics. The first was the generative 

component, which shows how a form of expression located on the language 

stratum always appeals to several combined regimes, in other words, how 

every regime of signs or semiotic is concretely mixed. On the level of this 

component, one can abstract forms of content, most successfully if empha-

sis is placed on the mixture of regimes in the form of expression: one should 

not, however, conclude from this the predominance of a regime constitut-

ing a general semiology and unifying forms. The second, transformational, 

component, shows how one abstract regime can be translated, transformed 

into another, and especially how it can be created from other regimes. This 

second component is obviously more profound, because all mixed regimes 

presuppose these transformations from one regime to another, past, pres-

ent, or potential (as a function of the creation of new regimes). Once again, 

one abstracts, or can abstract, content, since the analysis is limited to meta-

morphoses internal to the form of expression, even though the form of 

expression is not adequate to account for them. The third component is 
diagrammatic: it consists in taking regimes of signs or forms of expression 

and extracting from them particles-signs that are no longer formalized but 

instead constitute unformed traits capable of combining with one another. 

This is the height of abstraction, but also the moment at which abstraction

 

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becomes real; everything operates through abstract-real machines (which 

have names and dates). One can abstract forms of content, but one must 

simultaneously abstract forms of expression; for what is retained of each 

are only unformed traits. That is why an abstract machine that would oper-

ate purely on the level of language is an absurdity. It is clear that this dia-

grammatic component is in turn more profound than the transformational 

component: the creations-transformations of a regime of signs operate by 

the emergence of ever-new abstract machines. Finally, the last, properly 
machinic, component is meant to show how abstract machines are effectu-

ated in concrete assemblages; it is these assemblages that give distinct form 

to traits of expression, but not without doing the same for traits of 

content—the two forms being in reciprocal presupposition, or having a 

necessary, unformed relation that once again prevents the form of expres-

sion from behaving as though it were self-sufficient (although it is indepen-

dent or distinct in a strictly formal way).

 

Thus pragmatics (or schizoanalysis) can be represented by four circular 

components that bud and form rhizomes.

 

 

(1) The generative component: the study of concrete mixed semiotics; their mixtures 

and variations. (2) The transformational component: the study of pure semiotics; their 

transformations-translations and the creation of new semiotics. (3) The diagrammatic 

component: the study of abstract machines, from the standpoint of semiotically 

unformed matters in relation to physically unformed matters. (4) The machinic com-

ponent: the study of the assemblages that effectuate abstract machines, simultaneously 

semiotizing matters of expression and physicalizing matters of content.

 

Pragmatics as a whole would consist in this: making a tracing of the 

mixed semiotics, under the generative component; making the transfor-

mational  map  of the regimes, with their possibilities for translation and 

creation, for budding along the lines of the tracings; making the diagram of 

the abstract machines that are in play in each case, either as potentialities 

or as effective emergences; outlining the program of the assemblages that

 

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distribute everything and bring a circulation of movement with alternatives, 

jumps, and mutations.

 

For example, in considering a given "proposition," in other words, a ver-

bal aggregate defined syntactically, semantically, and logically as the 

expression of an individual or group ("I love you" or "I am jealous"), one 

would begin by asking to which "statement" this proposition corresponds 

in the group or individual (for the same proposition can be tied to com-

pletely different statements). This question means: What regime of signs is 

the proposition taken up by and without which its syntactical, semantic, 

and logical elements would remain totally empty universal conditions? 

What nonlinguistic element, or variable of enunciation, gives it consis-

tency? There is a presignifying "I love you" of the collective type in which, 

as Miller says, a dance weds all the women of the tribe; there is a 

counter-signifying "I love you" of the distributive and polemical type that 

has to do with war and relations of force (the "I love you" of Penthesilea 

and Achilles); there is an "I love you" that is addressed to a center of 

signifiance and uses interpretation to make a whole series of signifieds 

correspond to the signifying chain; and there is a postsignifying or 

passional "I love you" that constitutes a proceeding beginning from a 

point of subjectification, then another, and yet another. Similarly, the 

proposition "I am jealous" is clearly not the same statement in the 

passional regime of subjectification as in the paranoid regime of 

signifiance: these are two distinct delusions. Second, once it has been 

determined which statement the proposition corresponds to in a given 

group or individual at a given time, one would look into the possibilities 

not only of mixture but also of translation and transformation into another 

regime, or into statements belonging to other regimes; one would look at 

what passes and does not pass in such a transformation, what remains 

irreducible and what flows. Third, one could try to create new, as yet 

unknown statements for that proposition, even if the result were a patois 

of sensual delight, physical and semiotic systems in shreds, asubjective 

affects, signs without signifiance where syntax, semantics, and logic are in 

collapse. This research should go from the worst to the best since it would 

cover precious, metaphorical, or stultifying regimes as well as 

cries-whispers, feverish improvisations, becomings-animal, 

becomings-molecular, real transsexualities, continuums of intensity, con-

stitutions of bodies without organs . .. These two poles are inseparable; 

they entertain perpetual relations of transformation, conversion, jumping, 

falling, and rising. This final research simultaneously brings into play, on 

the one hand, abstract machines, diagrams and diagrammatic functions, 

and, on the other hand, machinic assemblages, the formal distinctions they 

make between expression and content, and their investments of words and 

organs according to a relation of reciprocal presupposition. For example,

 

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587 B.c.-AD. 70: ON SEVERAL REGIMES OF SIGNS

 

the "I love you" of courtly love: What is its diagram, what abstract machine 

emerges, and what is the new assemblage? These questions apply as much 

to destratification as to the organization of strata. In short, there are no 

syntactically, semantically, or logically definable propositions that tran-

scend or loom above statements. All methods for the 

transcendentaliza-tion of language, all methods for endowing language 

with universals, from Russell's logic to Chomsky's grammar, have fallen 

into the worst kind of abstraction, in the sense that they validate a level 

that is both too abstract and not abstract enough. Regimes of signs are not 

based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract 

machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is 

language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on 

abstract machines, diagrammatic functions, and machinic assemblages 

that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics, or logic. There is no 

universal prepositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any 

more than there is signifier for itself. "Behind" statements and 

semioticizations there are only machines, assemblages, and movements 

of deterritorialization that cut across the stratification of the various 

systems and elude both the coordinates of language and of existence. That 

is why pragmatics is not a complement to logic, syntax, or semantics; on 

the contrary, it is the fundamental element upon which all the rest depend.

 

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6.      November 28, 1947: How Do You

 

Make Yourself

 

a Body without Organs?

 

 

The Dogon Egg and the Distribution of Intensities

 

At any rate, you have one (or several). It's not so much that it preexists or 
comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any 
rate, you make one, you can't desire without making one. And it awaits you; 
it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the 
moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don't. This is not 
reassuring, because you can botch it. Or it can be terrifying, and lead you to 
your death. It is nondesire as well as desire. It is not at all a notion or a

 

149

 

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HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

 

concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without 

Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People 

ask, So what is this BwO?—But you're already on it, scurrying like a ver-

min, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveler 

and nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, fight—fight 

and are fought—seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous 

defeats; on it we penetrate and are penetrated; on it we love. On November 

28,1947, Artaud declares war on the organs: To be done with the judgment 
of God, 
"for you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless 

than an organ."

1

 Experimentation: not only radiophonic but also biologi-

cal and political, incurring censorship and repression. Corpus and Socius, 

politics and experimentation. They will not let you experiment in peace.

 

The BwO: it is already under way the moment the body has had enough 

of organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them. A long procession. 

The hypochondriac body: the organs are destroyed, the damage has already 

been done, nothing happens anymore. "Miss X claims that she no longer 

has a brain or nerves or chest or stomach or guts. All she has left is the skin 

and bones of a disorganized body. These are her own words."

2

 The para-

noid body: the organs are continually under attack by outside forces, but 

are also restored by outside energies. ("He lived for a long time without a 

stomach, without intestines, almost without lungs, with a torn oesophagus, 

without a bladder, and with shattered ribs, he used sometimes to swallow 

part of his own larynx with his food, etc. But divine miracles ('rays') always 

restored what had been destroyed.")

3

 The schizo body, waging its own 

active internal struggle against the organs, at the price of catatonia. Then 

the drugged body, the experimental schizo: "The human body is scandal-

ously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not 

have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and 

mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it 

should have been in the first place."

4

 The masochist body: it is poorly 

understood in terms of pain; it is fundamentally a question of the BwO. It 

has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes, anus, urethra, breasts, and nose 

are sewn shut. It has itself strung up to stop the organs from working; 

flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin; sodomized, smothered, to make 

sure everything is sealed tight.

 

Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified, 

sewn-up bodies, when the BwO is also full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance? So 

why these examples, why must we start there? Emptied bodies instead of 

full ones. What happened? Were you cautious enough? Not wisdom, cau-

tion. In doses. As a rule immanent to experimentation: injections of cau-

tion. Many have been defeated in this battle. Is it really so sad and 

dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your

 

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HOW 

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lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with 

your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on 

your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your 

belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage, 

Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation. 

Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say 

instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't 

sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, 

experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find 

out how to make it. It's a question of life and death, youth and old age, sad-

ness and joy. It is where everything is played out.

 

"Mistress, 1) You may tie me down on the table, ropes drawn tight, for 

ten to fifteen minutes, time enough to prepare the instruments; 2) One 

hundred lashes at least, a pause of several minutes; 3) You begin sewing, 

you sew up the hole in the glans; you sew the skin around the glans to the 

glans itself, preventing the top from tearing; you sew the scrotum to the skin 

of the thighs. You sew the breasts, securely attaching a button with four 

holes to each nipple. You may connect them with an elastic band with 

buttonholes—Now you go on to the second phase: 4) You can choose either 

to turn me over on the table so I am tied lying on my stomach, but with my 

legs together, or to bind me to the post with my wrists together, and my legs 

also, my whole body tightly bound; 5) You whip my back buttocks thighs, a 

hundred lashes at least; 6) You sew my buttocks together, all the way up and 

down the crack of my ass. Tightly, with a doubled thread, each stitch knot-

ted. If I am on the table, now tie me to the post; 7) You give me fifty thrashes 

on the buttocks; 8) If you wish to intensify the torture and carry out your 

threat from last time, stick the pins all the way into my buttocks as far as 

they go; 9) Then you may tie me to the chair; you give me thirty thrashes on 

the breasts and stick in the smaller pins; if you wish, you may heat them 

red-hot beforehand, all or sorne. I should be tightly bound to the chair, 

hands behind my back so my chest sticks out. I haven't mentioned burns, 

only because I have a medical exam coming up in awhile, and they take a 

long time to heal." This is not a phantasy, it is a program: There is an essen-

tial difference between the psychoanalytic interpretation of the phantasy 

and the antipsychiatric experimentation of the program. Between the 

phantasy, an interpretation that must itself be interpreted, and the motor 

program of experimentation.

5

 The BwO is what remains when you take 

everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and 

signifiances and subjectifications as a whole. Psychoanalysis does the 

opposite: it translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything 

into phantasy, it retains the phantasy. It royally botches the real, because it 

botches the BwO.

 

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Something will happen. Something is already happening. But what 

comes to pass on the BwO is not exactly the same as how you make yourself 

one. However, one is included in the other. Hence the two phases set forth 

in the preceding letter. Why two clearly distinguished phases, when the 

same thing is done in both cases—sewing and flogging? One phase is for the 

fabrication of the BwO, the other to make something circulate on it or pass 

across it; the same procedures are nevertheless used in both phases, but 

they must be done over, done twice. What is certain is that the masochist 

has made himself a BwO under such conditions that the BwO can no longer 

be populated by anything but intensities of pain, pain waves. It is false to 

say that the masochist is looking for pain but just as false to say that he is 

looking for pleasure in a particularly suspensive or roundabout way. The 

masochist is looking for a type of BwO that only pain can fill, or travel over, 

due to the very conditions under which that BwO was constituted. Pains 

are populations, packs, modes of king-masochist-in-the-desert that he 

engenders and augments. The same goes for the drugged body and intensi-

ties of cold, refrigerator waves. For each type of BwO, we must ask: (1) What 

type is it, how is it fabricated, by what procedures and means (predeter-

mining what will come to pass)? (2) What are its modes, what comes to 

pass, and with what variants and what surprises, what is unexpected and 

what expected? In short, there is a very special relation of synthesis and 

analysis between a given type of BwO and what happens on it: an a priori 

synthesis by which something will necessarily be produced in a given mode 

(but what it will be is not known) and an infinite analysis by which what is 

produced on the BwO is already part of that body's production, is already 

included in the body, is already on it (but at the price of an infinity of pas-

sages, divisions, and secondary productions). It is a very delicate experi-

mentation since there must not be any stagnation of the modes or slippage 

in type: the masochist and the drug user court these ever-present dangers 

that empty their BwO's instead of filling them.

 

You can fail twice, but it is the same failure, the same danger. Once at the 

level of the constitution of the BwO and again at the level of what passes or 

does not pass across it. You think you have made yourself a good BwO, that 

you chose the right Place, Power {Puissance), and Collectivity (there is 

always a collectivity, even when you are alone), and then nothing passes, 

nothing circulates, or something prevents things from moving. A paranoid 

point, a point of blockage, an outburst of delirium: it comes across clearly 

in  Speed,  by William Burroughs, Jr. Is it possible to locate this danger 

point, should the block be expelled, or should one instead "love, honor, and 

serve degeneracy wherever it surfaces"? To block, to be blocked, is that not 

still an intensity? In each case, we must define what comes to pass and what 

does not pass, what causes passage and prevents it. As in the meat circuit

 

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according to Lewin, something flows through channels whose sections are 

delimited by doors with gatekeepers, passers-on.

6

 Door openers and trap 

closers, Malabars and Fierabras. The body is now nothing more than a set 

of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels, each with a 

proper name: a peopling of the BwO, a Metropolis that has to be managed 

with a whip. What peoples it, what passes across it, what does the blocking?

 

A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by 

intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, 

a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has noth-

ing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes 

intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is 

itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is mat-

ter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to 

the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the 

matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that 

zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. 

Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is 

why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism 

and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the 

intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by 

dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic 

movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent 

of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as 

pure intensities.

7

 The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it 

changes gradient. "No organ is constant as regards either function or posi-

tion, ... sex organs sprout anywhere,... rectums open, defecate and close, 

... the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second 

adjustments."

8

 The tantric egg.

 

After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO? The attri-

butes are types or genuses of BwO's, substances, powers, zero intensities as 

matrices of production. The modes are everything that comes to pass: 

waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities 

produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix. The 

masochist body as an attribute or genus of substance, with its production 

of intensities and pain modes based on its degree 0 of being sewn up. The 

drugged body as a different attribute, with its production of specific inten-

sities based on absolute Cold = 0. ("Junkies always beef about The Cold as 

they call it, turning up their black coat collars and clutching their withered 

necks . . . pure junk con. A junky does not want to be warm, he wants to be 

cool-cooler-coLD. But he wants The Cold like he wants His Junk—

NOT 

OUTSIDE where it does him no good but INSIDE so he can sit around with a 

spine like a frozen hydraulic jack... his metabolism approaching Absolute

 

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Zero.")

9

 Etc. The problem of whether there is a substance of all substances, 

a single substance for all attributes, becomes: Is there a totality of all 
BwO'sl 
If the BwO is already a limit, what must we say of the totality of all 

BwO's? It is a problem not of the One and the Multiple but of a fusional 

multiplicity that effectively goes beyond any opposition between the one 

and the multiple. A formal multiplicity of substantial attributes that, as 

such, constitutes the ontological unity of substance. There is a continuum 

of all of the attributes or genuses of intensity under a single substance, and 

a continuum of the intensities of a certain genus under a single type or 

attribute. A continuum of all substances in intensity and of all intensities 

in substance. The uninterrupted continuum of the BwO. BwO, imma-

nence, immanent limit. Drug users, masochists, schizophrenics, lovers— 

all BwO's pay homage to Spinoza. The BwO is the field of immanence of 

desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a 

process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it 

be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it).

 

Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of 

immanence, a priest is behind it. The priest cast the triple curse on desire: 

the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent ideal. Facing 

north, the priest said, Desire is lack (how could it not lack what it desires?). 

The priest carried out the first sacrifice, named castration, and all the men 

and women of the north lined up behind him, crying in cadence, "Lack, 

lack, it's the common law." Then, facing south, the priest linked desire to 

pleasure. For there are hedonistic, even orgiastic, priests. Desire will be 

assuaged by pleasure; and not only will the pleasure obtained silence desire 

for a moment but the process of obtaining it is already a way of interrupting 

it, of instantly discharging it and unburdening oneself of it. Pleasure as dis-

charge: the priest carries out the second sacrifice, named masturbation. 

Then, facing east, he exclaimed: Jouissance is impossible, but impossible 
jouissance is inscribed in desire. For that, in its very impossibility, is the 

Ideal, the "manque-a-jouir that is life."

10

 The priest carried out the third 

sacrifice, phantasy or the thousand and one nights, the one hundred twenty 

days, while the men of the East chanted: Yes, we will be your phantasy, your 

ideal and impossibility, yours and also our own. The priest did not turn to 

the west. He knew that in the west lay a plane of consistency, but he thought 

that the way was blocked by the columns of Hercules, that it led nowhere 

and was uninhabited by people. But that is where desire was lurking, west 

was the shortest route east, as well as to the other directions, rediscovered 

or deterritorialized.

 

The most recent figure of the priest is the psychoanalyst, with his or her 

three principles: Pleasure, Death, and Reality. Doubtless, psychoanalysis 

demonstrated that desire is not subordinated to procreation, or even to

 

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genitality. That was its modernism. But it retained the essentials; it even 

found new ways of inscribing in desire the negative law of lack, the external 

rule of pleasure, and the transcendent ideal of phantasy. Take the interpre-

tation of masochism: when the ridiculous death instinct is not invoked, it is 

claimed that the masochist, like everybody else, is after pleasure but can 

only get it through pain and phantasied humiliations whose function is to 

allay or ward off deep anxiety. This is inaccurate; the masochist's suffering 

is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the 

pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure. Pleasure 

is in no way something that can be attained only by a detour through suffer-

ing; it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it inter-

rupts the continuous process of positive desire. There is, in fact, a joy that is 

immanent to desire as though desire were filled by itself and its contempla-

tions, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is not measured by 

pleasure since it is what distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents 

them from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt. In short, the mas-

ochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and 

bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire. That there are other ways, 

other procedures than masochism, and certainly better ones, is beside the 

point; it is enough that some find this procedure suitable for them.

 

Take a masochist who did not undergo psychoanalysis: "

PROGRAM 

. . . 

At night, put on the bridle and attach my hands more tightly, either to the 

bit with the chain, or to the big belt right after returning from the bath. Put 

on the entire harness right away also, the reins and thumbscrews, and 

attach the thumbscrews to the harness. My penis should be in a metal 

sheath. Ride the reins for two hours during the day, and in the evening as 

the master wishes. Confinement for three or four days, hands still tied, the 

reins alternately tightened and loosened. The master will never approach 

her horse without the crop, and without using it. If the animal should dis-

play impatience or rebelliousness, the reins will be drawn tighter, the mas-

ter will grab them and give the beast a good thrashing."

11

 What is this 

masochist doing? He seems to be imitating a horse, Equus eroticus, but 

that's not it. Nor are the horse and the master-trainer or mistress images of 

the mother or father. Something entirely different is going on: a 

becoming-animal essential to masochism. It is a question of forces. The 

masochist presents it this way: Training axiomdestroy the instinctive 
forces in order to replace them with transmitted forces. 
In fact, it is less a 

destruction than an exchange and circulation ("what happens to a horse 

can also happen to me"). Horses are trained: humans impose upon the 

horse's instinctive forces transmitted forces that regulate the former, 

select, dominate, overcode them. The masochist effects an inversion of 

signs: the horse transmits its transmitted forces to him, so that the 

masochist's innate

 

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forces will in turn be tamed. There are two series, the horse's (innate force, 

force transmitted by the human being), and the masochist's (force trans-

mitted by the horse, innate force of the human being). One series explodes 

into the other, forms a circuit with it: an increase in power or a circuit of 

intensities. The "master," or rather the mistress-rider, the equestrian, 

ensures the conversion of forces and the inversion of signs. The masochist 

constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously draws and fills the 

field of immanence of desire; he constitutes a body without organs or plane 

of consistency using himself, the horse, and the mistress. "Results to be 

obtained: that I am kept in continual expectancy of actions and orders, and 

that little by little all opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with 

yours. ... Thus at the mere thought of your boots, without even acknowl-

edging it, I must feel fear. In this way, it will no longer be women's legs that 
have an effect on me, 
and if it pleases you to command me to receive your 

caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will 

give me the imprint of your body as I have never had it before and never 

would have had it otherwise."'

2

 Legs are still organs, but the boots now only 

determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or zone on a BwO.

 

Similarly, or actually in a different way, it would be an error to interpret 

courtly love in terms of a law of lack or an ideal of transcendence. The 

renunciation of external pleasure, or its delay, its infinite regress, testifies 

on the contrary to an achieved state in which desire no longer lacks any-

thing but fills itself and constructs its own field of immanence. Pleasure is 

an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to "find 

themselves" in the process of desire that exceeds them; pleasures, even the 

most artificial, are reterritorializations. But the question is precisely 

whether it is necessary to find oneself. Courtly love does not love the self, 

any more than it loves the whole universe in a celestial or religious way. It is 

a question of making a body without organs upon which intensities pass, 

self and other—not in the name of a higher level of generality or a broader 

extension, but by virtue of singularities that can no longer be said to be per-

sonal, and intensities that can no longer be said to be extensive. The field of 

immanence is not internal to the self, but neither does it come from an 

external self or a nonself. Rather, it is like the absolute Outside that knows 

no Selves because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence 

in which they have fused. "Joy" in courtly love, the exchange of hearts, the 

test or "assay": everything is allowed, as long as it is not external to desire or 

transcendent to its plane, or else internal to persons. The slightest caress 

may be as strong as an orgasm; orgasm is a mere fact, a rather deplorable 

one, in relation to desire in pursuit of its principle. Everything is allowed: 

all that counts is for pleasure to be the flow of desire itself, Immanence, 

instead of a measure that interrupts it or delivers it to the three phantoms,

 

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namely, internal lack, higher transcendence, and apparent exteriority.

13

 If 

pleasure is not the norm of desire, it is not by virtue of a lack that is impossi-

ble to fill but, on the contrary, by virtue of its positivity, in other words, the 

plane of consistency it draws in the course of its process.

 

A great Japanese compilation of Chinese Taoist treatises was made in 

A

.

D

.

 

982-984. We see in it the formation of a circuit of intensities between 

female and male energy, with the woman playing the role of the innate or 

instinctive force (Yin) stolen by or transmitted to the man in such a way 

that the transmitted force of the man (Yang) in turn becomes innate, all the 

more innate: an augmentation of powers.

14

 The condition for this circula-

tion and multiplication is that the man not ejaculate. It is not a question of 

experiencing desire as an internal lack, nor of delaying pleasure in order to 

produce a kind of externalizable surplus value, but instead of constituting 

an intensive body without organs, Tao, a field of immanence in which 

desire lacks nothing and therefore cannot be linked to any external or tran-

scendent criterion. It is true that the whole circuit can be channeled toward 

procreative ends (ejaculation when the energies are right); that is how Con-

fucianism understood it. But this is true only for one side of the assemblage 

of desire, the side facing the strata, organisms, State, family... It is not 

true for the other side, the Tao side of destratification that draws a plane of 

consistency proper to desire. Is the Tao masochistic? Is courtly love Taoist? 

These questions are largely meaningless. The field of immanence or plane 

of consistency must be constructed. This can take place in very different 

social formations through very different assemblages (perverse, artistic, 

scientific, mystical, political) with different types of bodies without 

organs. It is constructed piece by piece, and the places, conditions, and 

techniques are irreducible to one another. The question, rather, is whether 

the pieces can fit together, and at what price. Inevitably, there will be mon-

strous crossbreeds. The plane of consistency would be the totality of all 

BwO's, a pure multiplicity of immanence, one piece of which may be Chi-

nese, another American, another medieval, another petty perverse, but all 

in a movement of generalized deterritorialization in which each person 

takes and makes what she or he can, according to tastes she or he will have 

succeeded in abstracting from a Self [Moi], according to a politics or strat-

egy successfully abstracted from a given formation, according to a given 

procedure abstracted from its origin.

 

We distinguish between: (1) BwO's, which are different types, genuses, 

or substantial attributes. For example, the Cold of the drugged BwO, the 

Pain of the masochist BwO. Each has its degree 0 as its principle of produc-

tion (remissio). (2) What happens on each type of BwO, in other words, the 

modes, the intensities that are produced, the waves that pass (latitudo). (3) 

The potential totality of all BwO's, the plane of consistency (Omnitudo,

 

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sometimes called the BwO). There are a number of questions. Not only 

how to make oneself a BwO, and how to produce the corresponding 

intensities without which it would remain empty (not exactly the same 

question). But also how to reach the plane of consistency. How to sew up, 

cool down, and tie together all the BwO's. If this is possible to do, it is only 

by conjugating the intensities produced on each BwO, by producing a con-

tinuum of all intensive continuities. Are not assemblages necessary to fab-

ricate each BwO, is not a great abstract Machine necessary to construct the 

plane of consistency? Gregory Bateson uses the term plateau for continu-

ous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow 

themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than 

they allow themselves to build toward a climax; examples are certain sex-

ual, or aggressive, processes in Balinese culture.

15

 A plateau is a piece of 

immanence. Every BwO is made up of plateaus. Every BwO is itself a pla-

teau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency. 

The BwO is a component of passage.

 

A rereading of H'eliogabale and Les Tarahumaras. For Heliogabalus is 

Spinoza, and Spinoza is Heliogabalus revived. And the Tarahumaras are 

experimentation, peyote. Spinoza, Heliogabalus, and experimentation 

have the same formula: anarchy and unity are one and the same thing, not 

the unity of the One, but a much stranger unity that applies only to the mul-

tiple.

16

 These two books by Artaud express the multiplicity of fusion, 

fusionability as infinite zero, the plane of consistency, Matter where no 

gods go; principles as forces, essences, substances, elements, remissions, 

productions; manners of being or modalities as produced intensities, 

vibrations, breaths, Numbers. Finally, the difficulty of reaching this world 

of crowned Anarchy if you go no farther than the organs ("the liver that 

turns the skin yellow, the brain wracked by syphilis, the intestines that 

expel filth") and if you stay locked into the organism, or into a stratum that 

blocks the flows and anchors us in this, our world.

 

We come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all the opposite 

of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. 

The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs 

called the organism. It is true that Artaud wages a struggle against the 

organs, but at the same time what he is going after, what he has it in for, is 

the organism: The body is the body. Alone it stands. And in no need of 
organs. Organism it never is. Organisms are the enemies of the body.

11

 The 

BwO is not opposed to the organs; rather, the BwO and its "true organs," 

which must be composed and positioned, are opposed to the organism, the 

organic organization of the organs. The judgment of God, the system of the 

judgment of God, the theological system, is precisely the operation of He 

who makes an organism, an organization of organs called the organism,

 

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because He cannot bear the BwO, because He pursues it and rips it apart so 

He can be first, and have the organism be first. The organism is already 

that, the judgment of God, from which medical doctors benefit and on 

which they base their power. The organism is not at all the body, the BwO; 

rather, it is a stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accu-

mulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful 

labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant 

and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences. The strata are 

bonds, pincers. "Tie me up if you wish." We are continually stratified. But 

who is this we that is not me, for the subject no less than the organism 

belongs to and depends on a stratum? Now we have the answer: the BwO is 

that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, 

foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also a significa-

tion and a subject—occur. For the judgment of God weighs upon and is 

exercised against the BwO; it is the BwO that undergoes it. It is in the BwO 

that the organs enter into the relations of composition called the organism. 

The BwO howls: "They've made me an organism! They've wrongfully 

folded me! They've stolen my body!" The judgment of God uproots it from 

its immanence and makes it an organism, a signification, a subject. It is the 

BwO that is stratified. It swings between two poles, the surfaces of stratifi-

cation into which it is recoiled, on which it submits to the judgment, and 

the plane of consistency in which it unfurls and opens to experimentation. 

If the BwO is a limit, if one is forever attaining it, it is because behind each 

stratum, encasted in it, there is always another stratum. For many a stra-

tum, and not only an organism, is necessary to make the judgment of God. 

A perpetual and violent combat between the plane of consistency, which 

frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata, and the sur-

faces of stratification that block it or make it recoil.

 

Let us consider the three great strata concerning us, in other words, the 

ones that most directly bind us: the organism, signifiance, and 

subjectifi-cation. The surface of the organism, the angle of signifiance and 

interpretation, and the point of subjectification or subjection. You will be 

organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your 

body—otherwise you're just depraved. You will be signifier and 

signified, interpreter and interpreted—otherwise you're just a deviant. 

You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation 

recoiled into a subject of the statement—otherwise you're just a tramp. 

To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or 

articulations) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation 

as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and 

nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in place, never stop 

moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification). What does it mean to 

disarticulate, to cease to be an organism? How can we

 

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160 D HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

 

convey how easy it is, and the extent to which we do it every day? And how 

necessary caution is, the art of dosages, since overdose is a danger. You 

don't do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. You invent 

self-destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive. Dismantling 

the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body 

to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, 

conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of 

intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft 

of a surveyor. Actually, dismantling the organism is no more difficult 

than dismantling the other two strata, signifiance and subjectification. 

Signifiance clings to the soul just as the organism clings to the body, and 

it is not easy to get rid of either. And how can we unhook ourselves from 

the points of subjectification that secure us, nail us down to a dominant 

reality? Tearing the conscious away from the subject in order to make it a 

means of exploration, tearing the unconscious away from signifiance and 

interpretation in order to make it a veritable production: this is assuredly 

no more or less difficult than tearing the body away from the organism. 

Caution is the art common to all three; if in dismantling the organism there 

are times one courts death, in slipping away from signifiance and subjection 

one courts falsehood, illusion and hallucination and psychic death. Artaud 

weighs and measures every word: the conscious "knows what is good for it 

and what is of no value to it: it knows which thoughts and feelings it can 

receive without danger and with profit, and which are harmful to the 

exercise of its freedom. Above all, it knows just how far its own being 

goes, and just how far it has not yet gone or does not have the right to go 

without sinking into the unreal, the illusory, the unmade, the unprepared ... 

a  Plane  which normal consciousness does not reach but which Ciguri 

allows us to reach, and which is the very mystery of all poetry. But there is 

in human existence another plane, obscure and formless, where 

consciousness has not entered, and which surrounds it like an 

unilluminated extension or a menace, as the case may be. And which itself 

gives off adventurous sensations, perceptions. These are those shameless 

fantasies which affect an unhealthy conscious. ... I too have had false 

sensations and perceptions and I have believed in them."

18

 

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and 

you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only 

to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, 

when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep 

small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond 

to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its 

plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered 

the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they

 

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had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at 

which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of 

the organs we call the organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching 

the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but 

nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is 

because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it 

and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you 

blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing 

the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged 

toward catastrophe. Staying stratified—organized, signified, subjected— 

is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw 

the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down 

on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a 

stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous 

place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines 

of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try 

out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new 

land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one 

succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and 

escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, con-

jugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and sub-

jective programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified 

for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata 

to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assem-

blage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only 

there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, con-

junction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your 

own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective 

machines. Castaneda describes a long process of experimentation (it 

makes little difference whether it is with peyote or other things): let us 

recall for the moment how the Indian forces him first to find a "place," 

already a difficult operation, then to find "allies," and then gradually to 

give up interpretation, to construct flow by flow and segment by segment 

lines of experimentation, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, etc. For 

the BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a 

Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, 

powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not "my" body without 

organs, instead the "me" (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable 

and changing in form, crossing thresholds).

 

In the course of Castaneda's books, the reader may begin to doubt the 

existence of the Indian Don Juan, and many other things besides. But that 

has no importance. So much the better if the books are a syncretism rather

 

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than an ethnographical study, and the protocol of an experiment rather 

than an account of an initiation. The fourth book, Tales of Power, is about 

the living distinction between the "Tonal" and the "Nagual." The tonal 

seems to cover many disparate things: It is the organism, and also all that is 

organized and organizing; but it is also signifiance, and all that is signifying 

or signified, all that is susceptible to interpretation, explanation, all that is 

memorizable in the form of something recalling something else; finally, it 

is the Self (Moi), the subject, the historical, social, or individual person, 

and the corresponding feelings. In short, the tonal is everything, including 

God, the judgment of God, since it "makes up the rules by which it appre-

hends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world."

19

 Yet 

the tonal is only an island. For the nagual is also everything. And it is the 

same everything, but under such conditions that the body without organs 

has replaced the organism and experimentation has replaced all interpreta-

tion, for which it no longer has any use. Flows of intensity, their fluids, their 

fibers, their continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine 

segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject. 

Becomings, becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, have replaced his-

tory, individual or general. In fact, the tonal is not as disparate as it seems: 

it includes all of the strata and everything that can be ascribed to the strata, 

the organization of the organism, the interpretations and explanations of 

the signifiable, the movements of subjectification. The nagual, on the con-

trary, dismantles the strata. It is no longer an organism that functions but a 

BwO that is constructed. No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or 

phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make sig-

nify; instead, there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities (and 

when you become-dog, don't ask if the dog you are playing with is a dream 

or a reality, if it is "your goddam mother" or something else entirely). There 

is no longer a Self [Moi] that feels, acts, and recalls; there is "a glowing fog, a 

dark yellow mist" that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.

20 

The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a 

sudden. You have to diminish it, shrink it, clean it, and that only at certain 

moments. You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of 

the nagual. For a nagual that erupts, that destroys the tonal, a body without 

organs that shatters all the strata, turns immediately into a body of noth-

ingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death: "The tonal 

must be protected at any cost."

21

 

We still have not answered the question of why there are so many dan-

gers, and so many necessary precautions. It is not enough to set up an 

abstract opposition between the strata and the BwO. For the BwO already 

exists in the strata as well as on the destratified plane of consistency, but in 

a totally different manner. Take the organism as a stratum: there is indeed a

 

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BwO that opposes the organization of the organs we call the organism, but 

there is also a BwO of the organism that belongs to that stratum. Cancerous 
tissue: 
each instant, each second, a cell becomes cancerous, mad, prolife-

rates and loses its configuration, takes over everything; the organism must 

resubmit it to its rule or restratify it, not only for its own survival, but also 

to make possible an escape from the organism, the fabrication of the 

"other" BwO on the plane of consistency. Take the stratum of signifiance: 

once again, there is a cancerous tissue, this time of signifiance, a burgeon-

ing body of the despot that blocks any circulation of signs, as well as 

preventing the birth of the asignifying sign on the "other" BwO. Or take a 

stifling body of subjectification, which makes a freeing all the more 

unlikely by forbidding any remaining distinction between subjects. Even if 

we consider given social formations, or a given stratic apparatus within a 

formation, we must say that every one of them has a BwO ready to gnaw, 

proliferate, cover, and invade the entire social field, entering into relations 

of violence and rivalry as well as alliance and complicity. A BwO of money 

(inflation), but also a BwO of the State, army, factory, city, Party, etc. If the 

strata are an affair of coagulation and sedimentation, all a stratum needs is 

a high sedimentation rate for it to lose its configuration and articulations, 

and to form its own specific kind of tumor, within itself or in a given forma-

tion or apparatus. The strata spawn their own BwO's, totalitarian and fas-

cist BwO's, terrifying caricatures of the plane of consistency. It is not 

enough to make a distinction between full BwO's on the plane of consis-

tency and empty BwO's on the debris of strata destroyed by a too-violent 

destratification. We must also take into account cancerous BwO's in a stra-

tum that has begun to proliferate. The three-body problem. Artaud said that 

outside the "plane" is another plane surrounding us with "an 

unillu-minated extension or a menace, as the case may be." It is a struggle 

and as such is never sufficiently clear. How can we fabricate a BwO for 

ourselves without its being the cancerous BwO of a fascist inside us, or 

the empty BwO of a drug addict, paranoiac, or hypochondriac? How can 

we tell the three Bodies apart? Artaud was constantly grappling with this 

problem. The extraordinary composition of To Be Done with the 
Judgment of God: 
he begins by cursing the cancerous body of America, 

the body of war and money; he denounces the strata, which he calls 

"caca"; to the strata he opposes the true Plane, even if it is only peyote, 

the little trickle of the Tarahumaras; but he also knows about the dangers 

of a too-sudden, careless destratification. Artaud was constantly grappling 

with all of that, and flowed with it. Letter to Hitler: "Dear Sir, In 1932 in the 

Ider Cafe in Berlin, on one of the evenings when I made your acquaintance 

and shortly before you took power, I showed you roadblocks on a map that 
was not just a map of geography, 
roadblocks against me, an act of force 

aimed in a certain

 

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number of directions you indicated to me. Today Hitler I lift the road-

blocks I set down! The Parisians need gas. Yours, A.A.—P.S. Be it under-

stood, dear sir, that this is hardly an invitation, it is above all a warning."

22 

That map that is not only a map of geography is something like a BwO 

intensity map, where the roadblocks designate thresholds and the gas, 

waves or flows. Even if Artaud did not succeed for himself, it is certain that 

through him something has succeeded for us all.

 

The BwO is the egg. But the egg is not regressive; on the contrary, it is 

perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your own milieu of 

experimentation, your associated milieu. The egg is the milieu of pure 

intensity, spatium not extension, Zero intensity as principle of production. 

There is a fundamental convergence between science and myth, embryol-

ogy and mythology, the biological egg and the psychic or cosmic egg: the egg 

always designates this intensive reality, which is not undifferentiated, but 

is where things and organs are distinguished solely by gradients, migra-

tions, zones of proximity. The egg is the BwO. The BwO is not "before" the 

organism; it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of construct-

ing itself. If it is tied to childhood, it is not in the sense that the adult 

regresses to the child and the child to the Mother, but in the sense that the 

child, like the Dogon twin who takes a piece of the placenta with him, tears 

from the organic form of the Mother an intense and destratified matter 

that on the contrary constitutes his or her perpetual break with the past, his 

or her present experience, experimentation. The BwO is a childhood block, 

a becoming, the opposite of a childhood memory. It is not the child 

"before" the adult, or the mother "before" the child: it is the strict contem-

poraneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child, their map of compar-

ative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map. The 

BwO is precisely this intense germen where there are not and cannot be 

either parents or children (organic representation). This is what Freud 

failed to understand about Weissmann: the child as the germinal contem-

porary of its parents. Thus the BwO is never yours or mine. It is always 

body. It is no more projective than it is regressive. It is an involution, but 

always a contemporary, creative involution. The organs distribute them-

selves on the BwO, but they distribute themselves independently of the 

form of the organism; forms become contingent, organs are no longer any-

thing more than intensities that are produced, flows, thresholds, and gradi-

ents. "A" stomach, "an" eye, "a" mouth: the indefinite article does not lack 

anything; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the 

pure determination of intensity, intensive difference. The indefinite arti-

cle is the conductor of desire. It is not at all a question of a fragmented, 

splintered body, of organs without the body (OwB). The BwO is exactly the 

opposite. There are not organs in the sense of fragments in relation to a lost

 

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unity, nor is there a return to the undifferentiated in relation to a 

differen-tiable totality. There is a distribution of intensive principles of 

organs, with their positive indefinite articles, within a collectivity or 

multiplicity, inside an assemblage, and according to machinic 

connections operating on a BwO. Logos spermaticos. The error of 

psychoanalysis was to understand BwO phenomena as regressions, 

projections, phantasies, in terms of an image of the body. As a result, it 

only grasps the flipside of the BwO and immediately substitutes family 

photos, childhood memories, and part-objects for a worldwide intensity 

map. It understands nothing about the egg nor about indefinite articles 

nor about the contemporaneousness of a continually self-constructing 

milieu.

 

The BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one de-

sires. And not only because it is the plane of consistency or the field of 

immanence of desire. Even when it falls into the void of too-sudden 

destra-tification, or into the proliferation of a cancerous stratum, it is still 

desire. Desire stretches that far: desiring one's own annihilation, or 

desiring the power to annihilate. Money, army, police, and State desire, 

fascist desire, even fascism is desire. There is desire whenever there is the 

constitution of a BwO under one relation or another. It is a problem not of 

ideology but of pure matter, a phenomenon of physical, biological, 

psychic, social, or cosmic matter. That is why the material problem 

confronting schizoanalysis is knowing whether we have it within our means 

to make the selection, to distinguish the BwO from its doubles: empty 

vitreous bodies, cancerous bodies, totalitarian and fascist. The test of desire: 

not denouncing false desires, but distinguishing within desire between that 

which pertains to stratic proliferation, or else too-violent destratification, 

and that which pertains to the construction of the plane of consistency 

(keep an eye out for all that is fascist, even inside us, and also for the 

suicidal and the demented). The plane of consistency is not simply that 

which is constituted by the sum of all BwO's. There are things it rejects; 

the BwO chooses, as a function of the abstract machine that draws it. 

Even within a BwO (the masochist body, the drugged body, etc.), we 

must distinguish what can be composed on the plane and what cannot. 

There is a fascist use of drugs, or a suicidal use, but is there also a possible 

use that would be in conformity with the plane of consistency? Even 

paranoia: Is there a possibility of using it that way in part? When we 

asked the question of the totality of all BwO's, considered as substantial 

attributes of a single substance, it should have been understood, strictly 

speaking, to apply only to the plane. The plane is the totality of the full 

BwO's that have been selected (there is no positive totality including the 

cancerous or empty bodies). What is the nature of this totality? Is it solely 

logical? Or must we say that each BwO, from a basis in its own genus, 

produces effects identical or analogous to the effects other

 

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HOW DO YOU MAKE YOURSELF A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?

 

BwO's produce from a basis in their genera? Could what the drug user or 

masochist obtains also be obtained in a different fashion in the conditions 

of the plane, so it would even be possible to use drugs without using drugs, 

to get soused on pure water, as in Henry Miller's experimentations? Or is it 

a question of a real passage of substances, an intensive continuum of all the 

BwO's? Doubtless, anything is possible. All we are saying is that the iden-

tity of effects, the continuity of genera, the totality of all BwO's, can be 

obtained on the plane of consistency only by means of an abstract machine 

capable of covering and even creating it, by assemblages capable of plug-

ging into desire, of effectively taking charge of desires, of assuring their 

continuous connections and transversal tie-ins. Otherwise, the BwO's of 

the plane will remain separated by genus, marginalized, reduced to means 

of bordering, while on the "other plane" the emptied or cancerous doubles 

will triumph.

 

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7.   Year Zero: Faciality

 

 

Earlier, we encountered two axes, signifiance and subjectification. We saw 
that they were two very different semiotic systems, or even two strata. 
Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs 
and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which 
it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies. Since all semiotics 
are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise 
that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly 
enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system. A broad face with 
white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head, 
white clown, moon-white mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud. The face is 
not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels. The 
form of the signifier in language, even its units, would remain indetermi-
nate if the potential listener did not use the face of the speaker to guide his 
or her choices ("Hey, he seems angry ..."; "He couldn't say it..."; "You 
see my face when I'm talking to you ..."; "look at me carefully..."). A

 

167

 

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child, woman, mother, man, father, boss, teacher, police officer, does not 

speak a general language but one whose signifying traits are indexed to spe-

cific faciality traits. Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of 

frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any 

expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations. 

Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion, 

would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that 

select the sensed or mental reality and make it conform in advance to a 

dominant reality. The face itself is redundancy. It is itself in redundancy 

with the redundancies of signifiance or frequency, and those of resonance 

or subjectivity. The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order 

to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. 

The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; 

it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the 

camera, the third eye.

 

Or should we say things differently? It is not exactly the face that consti-

tutes the wall of the signifier or the hole of subjectivity. The face, at least the 

concrete face, vaguely begins to take shape on the white wall. It vaguely 

begins to appear in the black hole. In film, the close-up of the face can be 

said to have two poles: make the face reflect light or, on the contrary, 

emphasize its shadows to the point of engulfing it "in pitiless darkness."

1

 A 

psychologist once said that the face is a visual percept that crystallizes out 

of "different varieties of vague luminosity without form or dimension." A 

suggestive whiteness, a hole that captures, a face. According to this 

account, the dimensionless black hole and formless white wall are already 

there to begin with. And there are already a number of possible combina-

tions in the system: either black holes distribute themselves on the white 

wall, or the white wall unravels and moves toward a black hole combining 

all black holes, hurtling them together or making them "crest." Sometimes 

faces appear on the wall, with their holes; sometimes they appear in the 

hole, with their linearized, rolled-up wall. A horror story, the face is a hor-

ror story. It is certain that the signifier does not construct the wall that it 

needs all by itself; it is certain that subjectivity does not dig its hole all 

alone. Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are 

engendered by an abstract machine of faciality (visageite), which produces 

them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall and subjectivity 

its black hole. Thus the black hole/white wall system is, to begin with, not a 

face but the abstract machine that produces faces according to the change-

able combinations of its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to 

resemble what it produces, or will produce.

 

The abstract machine crops up when you least expect it, at a chance 

juncture when you are just falling asleep, or into a twilight state or halluci-

 

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nating, or doing an amusing physics experiment ... Kafka's novella, 

"Blumfeld":

2

 the bachelor returns home in the evening to find two little 

ping-pong balls jumping around by themselves on the "wall" constituted 

by the floor. They bounce everywhere and even try to hit him in the face. 

They apparently contain other, still smaller, electric balls. Blumfeld finally 

manages to lock them up in the black hole of a wardrobe. The scene contin-

ues the next day when Blumfeld tries to give the balls to a small, feeble-

minded boy and two grimacing little girls, and then at the office, where he 

encounters his two grimacing and feebleminded assistants, who want to 

make off with a broom. In a wonderful ballet by Debussy and Nijinsky, a 

little tennis ball comes bouncing onto the stage at dusk, and at the end 

another ball appears in a similar fashion. This time, between the two balls, 

two girls and a boy who watches them develop passional dance and facial 

traits in vague luminosities (curiosity, spite, irony, ecstasy. . .).

3

 There is 

nothing to explain, nothing to interpret. It is the pure abstract machine of a 

twilight state. White wall/black hole? But depending on the combinations, 

the wall could just as well be black, and the hole white. The balls can bounce 

off of a wall or spin into a black hole. Even upon impact they can have the 

relative role of a hole in relation to the wall, just as when they are rolling 

straight ahead they can have the relative role of a wall in relation to the hole 

they are heading for. They circulate in the white wall/black hole system. 

Nothing in all of this resembles a face, yet throughout the system faces are 

distributed and faciality traits organized. Nevertheless, the abstract 

machine can be effectuated in other things besides faces, but not in any 

order, and not without the necessary foundation (raisons).

 

The face has been a major concern of American psychology, in particu-

lar the relation between the mother and the child through eye-to-eye con-

tact. Four-eye machine? Let us recall certain stages in the research: (1) 

Isakower's studies on falling asleep, in which so-called proprioceptive sen-

sations of a manual, buccal, cutaneous, or even vaguely visual nature recall 

the infantile mouth-breast relation. (2) Lewin's discovery of a white screen 

of the dream, which is ordinarily covered by visual contents but remains 

white when the only dream contents are proprioceptive sensations (this 

screen or white wall, once again, is the breast as it approaches, getting 

larger and then pressing flat). (3) Spitz's interpretation according to which 

the white screen, rather than being a representation of the breast itself as an 

object of tactile sensation or contact, is a visual percept implying a mini-

mum of distance and upon which the mother's face appears for the child to 

use as a guide in finding the breast. Thus there is a combination of two very 

different kinds of elements: manual, buccal, or cutaneous proprioceptive 

sensations; and the visual perception of the face seen from the front against 

the white screen, with the shape of the eyes drawn in for black holes. This

 

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170 □ YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

 

visual perception very quickly assumes decisive importance for the act of 

eating, in relation to the breast as a volume and the mouth as a cavity, both 

experienced through touch.

4

 

We can now propose the following distinction: the face is part of a 

surface-holes, holey surface, system. This system should under no cir-

cumstances be confused with the volume-cavity system proper to the 

(proprioceptive) body. The head is included in the body, but the face is not. 

The face is a surface: facial traits, lines, wrinkles; long face, square face, tri-

angular face; the face is a map, even when it is applied to and wraps a vol-

ume, even when it surrounds and borders cavities that are now no more 

than holes. The head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face. The 

face is produced only when the head ceases to be a part of the body, when it 

ceases to be coded by the body, when it ceases to have a multidimensional, 

polyvocal corporeal code—when the body, head included, has been 

decoded and has to be overcoded'by something we shall call the Face. This 

amounts to saying that the head, all the volume-cavity elements of the 

head, have to be facialized. What accomplishes this is the screen with holes, 

the white wall/black hole, the abstract machine producing faciality. But the 

operation does not end there: if the head and its elements are facialized, the 

entire body also can be facialized, comes to be facialized as part of an inevi-

table process. When the mouth and nose, but first the eyes, become a holey 

surface, all the other volumes and cavities of the body follow. An operation 

worthy of Doctor Moreau: horrible and magnificent. Hand, breast, stom-

ach, penis and vagina, thigh, leg and foot, all come to be facialized. Fetish-

ism, erotomania, etc., are inseparable from these processes of 

facializa-tion. It is not at all a question of taking a part of the body and 

making it resemble a face, or making a dream-face dance in a cloud. No 

anthropomorphism here. Facialization operates not by resemblance but by 

an order of reasons. It is a much more unconscious and machinic 

operation that draws the entire body across the holey surface, and in which 

the role of the face is not as a model or image, but as an overcoding of all 

of the decoded parts. Everything remains sexual; there is no sublimation, 

but there are new coordinates. It is precisely because the face depends on 
an abstract machine that it is not content to cover the head, 
but touches all 

other parts of the body, and even, if necessary, other objects without 

resemblance.  The question then becomes what circumstances trigger the 
machine 
that produces the face and facialization. Although the head, even 

the human head, is not necessarily a face, the face is produced in 

humanity. But it is produced by a necessity that does not apply to human 

beings "in general." The face is not animal, but neither is it human in 

general; there is even something absolutely inhuman about the face. It 

would be an error to proceed as though the face became inhuman only 

beyond a certain threshold: close-

 

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up, extreme magnification, recondite expression, etc. The inhuman in 

human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a 

close-up, with its inanimate white surfaces, its shining black holes, its 

emptiness and boredom. Bunker-face. To the point that if human beings 

have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and 

facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by 

returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite 

spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get 

past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits 

themselves finally elude the organization of the face—freckles dashing 

toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of 

seeing yourself in or gazing into in those glum face-to-face encounters 

between signifying subjectivities. "I no longer look into the eyes of the 

woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and 

I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the 

world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatsoever. ... I have broken the 

wall. . .. My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the 

known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving 

with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never 

dwindling.... Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth."

5

 BwO. Yes, 

the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled. On the 

road to the asignifying and asubjective. But so far we have explained 

nothing of what we sense.

 

The move from the body-head system to the face system has nothing to 

do with an evolution or genetic stages. Nor with phenomenological posi-

tions. Nor with integrations of part-objects, or structural or structuring sys-

tems. Nor can there be any appeal to a preexisting subject, or one brought 

into existence, except by this machine specific to faciality. In the literature 

of the face, Sartre's text on the look and Lacan's on the mirror make the 

error of appealing to a form of subjectivity or humanity reflected in a 

phenomenological field or split in a structural field. The gaze is but secon-
dary in relation to thegazeless eyes, to the black hole of faciality. The mirror 
is but secondary in relation to the white wall of faciality. 
Neither will we 

speak of a genetic axis, or the integration of part-objects. Any approach 

based on stages in ontogenesis is arbitrary: it is thought that what is fastest 

is primary, or even serves as a foundation or springboard for what comes 

next. An approach based on part-objects is even worse; it is the approach of 

a demented experimenter who flays, slices, and anatomizes everything in 

sight, and then proceeds to sew things randomly back together again. You 

can make any list of part-objects you want: hand, breast, mouth, eyes... 

It's still Frankenstein. What we need to consider is not fundamentally 

organs without bodies, or the fragmented body; it is the body without 

organs, animated by various intensive movements that determine the

 

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YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

 

nature and emplacement of the organs in question and make that body an 

organism, or even a system of strata of which the organism is only a part. It 

becomes apparent that the slowest of movements, or the last to occur or 

arrive, is not the least intense. And the fastest may already have converged 

with it, connected with it, in the disequilibrium of a nonsynchronic devel-

opment of strata that have different speeds and lack a sequence of stages 

but are nevertheless simultaneous. The question of the body is not one of 

part-objects but of differential speeds.

 

These movements are movements of deterritorialization. They are what 

"make" the body an animal or human organism. For example, the prehen-

sile hand implies a relative deterritorialization not only of the front paw but 

also of the locomotor hand. It has a correlate, the use-object or tool: the 

club is a deterritorialized branch. The breast of the woman, with her up-

right posture, indicates a deterritorialization of the animal's mammary 

gland; the mouth of the child, adorned with lips by an outfolding of the 

mucous membranes, marks a deterritorialization of the snout and mouth 

of the animal. Lips-breast: each serves as a correlate of the other.

6

 The 

human head implies a deterritorialization in relation to the animal and has 

as its correlate the organization of a world, in other words, a milieu that has 

itself been deterritorialized (the steppe is the first "world," in contrast to 

the forest milieu). But the face represents a far more intense, if slower, 

deterritorialization. We could say that it is an absolute deterritorialization: 

it is no longer relative because it removes the head from the stratum of the 

organism, human or animal, and connects it to other strata, such as 

signi-fiance and subjectification. Now the face has a correlate of great 

importance: the landscape, which is not just a milieu but a 

deterritorialized world. There are a number of face-landscape correlations, 

on this "higher" level. Christian education exerts spiritual control over 

both faciality and landscapity (paysageit'e):  Compose them both, color 

them in, complete them, arrange them according to a complementarity 

linking landscapes to faces.

7

 Face and landscape manuals formed a 

pedagogy, a strict discipline, and were an inspiration to the arts as much as 

the arts were an inspiration to them. Architecture positions its 

ensembles—houses, towns or cities, monuments or factories—to 

function like faces in the landscape they transform. Painting takes up the 

same movement but also reverses it, positioning a landscape as a face, 

treating one like the other: "treatise on the face and the landscape." The 

close-up in film treats the face primarily as a landscape; that is the 

definition of film, black hole and white wall, screen and camera. But the 

same goes for the earlier arts, architecture, painting, even the novel: 

close-ups animate and invent all of their correlations. So, is your mother a 

landscape or a face? A face or a factory? (Godard.) All faces envelop an 

unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated

 

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by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past. What 

face has not called upon the landscapes it amalgamated, sea and hill; what 

landscape has not evoked the face that would have completed it, providing 

an unexpected complement for its lines and traits? Even when painting 

becomes abstract, all it does is rediscover the black hole and white wall, the 

great composition of the white canvas and black slash. Tearing, but also 

stretching of the canvas along an axis of escape (fuite), at a vanishing point 
(point defuite), along a diagonal, by a knife slice, slash, or hole: the machine 

is already in place that always functions to produce faces and landscapes, 

however abstract. Titian began his paintings in black and white, not to 

make outlines to fill in, but as the matrix for each of the colors to come.

 

The novel—A flock of geese flew which the snow had dazzled. [Perceval] 

saw them and heard them, for they were going away noisily because of a fal-
con which came drawing after them at a great rate until he found abandoned 
one separated from the flock, and he struck it so and bruised it that he 
knockedit down to earth.... When Perceval saw the trampled snow on which 
the goose had lain, and the blood which appeared around, he leaned upon his 
lance and looked at that image, for the blood and the snow together seemed 
to him like the fresh color which was on the face of his friend, and he thinks 
until he forgets himself; for the vermilion seated on white was on her face just 
the same as these three drops of blood on the white snow.... We have seen a 
knight who is dozing on his charger. 
Everything is there: the redundancy 

specific to the face and landscape, the snowy white wall of the 

landscape-face, the black hole of the falcon and the three drops distributed 

on the wall; and, simultaneously, the silvery line of the landscape-face 

spinning toward the black hole of the knight deep in catatonia. Cannot the 

knight, at certain times and under certain conditions, push the movement 

further still, crossing the black hole, breaking through the white wall, 

dismantling the face— even if the attempt may backfire?

8

 All of this is in 

no way characteristic of the genre of the novel only at the end of its 

history; it is there from the beginning, it is an essential part of the genre. It 

is false to see Don Quixote as the end of the chivalric novel, invoking the 

hero's hallucinations, harebrained ideas, and hypnotic or cataleptic states. It 

is false to see novels such as Beckett's as the end of the novel in general, 

invoking the black holes, the characters' line of deterritorialization, the 

schizophrenic promenades of Molloy or the Unnameable, their loss of 

their names, memory, or purpose. The novel does have an evolution, but 

that is surely not it. The novel has always been defined by the adventure 

of lost characters who no longer know their name, what they are looking 

for, or what they are doing, amnesiacs, ataxics, catatonics. They 

differentiate the genre of the novel from the genres of epic or drama 

(when the dramatic or epic hero is stricken with folly or forgetting, etc., it 

is in an entirely different way). La princesse de

 

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Cleves is a novel precisely by virtue of what seemed paradoxical to the peo-

ple of the time: the states of absence or "rest," the sleep that overtakes the 

characters. There is always a Christian education in the novel. Molloy is the 

beginning of the genre of the novel. When the novel began, with Chretien 

de Troyes, for example, the essential character that would accompany it 

over the entire course of its history was already there: The knight of the 

novel of courtly love spends his time forgetting his name, what he is doing, 

what people say to him, he doesn't know where he is going or to whom he is 

speaking, he is continually drawing a line of absolute deterritorialization, 

but also losing his way, stopping, and falling into black holes. "He awaits 

chivalry and adventure." Open Chretien de Troyes to any page and you will 

find a catatonic knight seated on his steed, leaning on his lance, waiting, 

seeing the face of his loved one in the landscape; you have to hit him to 

make him respond. Lancelot, in the presence of the queen's white face, 

doesn't notice his horse plunge into the river; or he gets into a passing cart 

and it turns out to be the cart of disgrace. There is a face-landscape aggre-

gate proper to the novel, in which black holes sometimes distribute them-

selves on a white wall, and the white line of the horizon sometimes spins 

toward a black hole, or both simultaneously.

 

Theorems of Deterritorialization, or 

Machinic Propositions

9

 

First theorem: One never deterritorializes alone; there are always at least 

two terms, hand-use object, mouth-breast, face-landscape. And each of the 

two terms reterritorializes on the other. Reterritorialization must not be 

confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality: it necessarily 

implies a set of artifices by which one element, itself deterritorialized, 

serves as a new territoriality for another, which has lost its territoriality as 

well. Thus there is an entire system of horizontal and complementary 

reter-ritorializations, between hand and tool, mouth and breast, face and 

landscape. Second theorem: The fastest of two elements or movements of 

deterritorialization is not necessarily the most intense or most deterri-

torialized. Intensity of deterritorialization must not be confused with 

speed of movement or development. The fastest can even connect its inten-

sity to the slowest, which, as an intensity, does not come after the fastest but 

is simultaneously at work on a different stratum or plane (for example, the 

way the breast-mouth relation is guided from the start by a plane of 

faciality). Third theorem: It can even be concluded from this that the least 

deterritorialized reterritorializes on the most  deterritorialized. This is 

where the second system of reterritorializations comes in, the vertical 

system running from bottom to top. This is the sense in which not only

 

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the mouth but also the breast, hand, the entire body, even the tool, are 

"facialized." As a general rule, relative deterritorializations (transcoding) 

reterritorialize on a deterritorialization that is in certain respects absolute 

(overcoding). We have seen that the deterritorialization of the head into a 

face is absolute but remains negative in that it passes from one stratum to 

another, from the stratum of the organism to those of signifiance and 

subjectification. The hand and breast reterritorialize on the face and in the 

landscape: they are facialized at the same time as they are landscapified. 

Even a use-object may come to be facialized: you might say that a house, 

utensil, or object, an article of clothing, etc., is watching me, not because it 

resembles a face, but because it is taken up in the white wall/black hole 

process, because it connects to the abstract machine of facialization. The 

close-up in film pertains as much to a knife, cup, clock, or kettle as to a face 

or facial element, for example, Griffith's "the kettle is watching me." Is it 

not fair to say, then, that there are close-ups in novels, as when Dickens 

writes the opening line of The Cricket on the Hearth: "The kettle began 

it. . .",

10

 and in painting, when a utensil becomes a face-landscape from 

within, or when a cup on a tablecloth or a teapot is facialized, in Bonnard, 

Vuillard? Fourth theorem: The abstract machine is therefore effectuated 

not only in the faces that produce it but also to varying degrees in body 

parts, clothes, and objects that it facializes following an order of reasons 

(rather than an organization of resemblances).

 

Yet the question remains: When does the abstract machine of faciality 

enter into play? When is it triggered? Take some simple examples: the 

maternal power operating through the face during nursing; the passional 

power operating through the face of the loved one, even in caresses; the 

political power operating through the face of the leader (streamers, icons, 

and photographs), even in mass actions; the power of film operating 

through the face of the star and the close-up; the power of television. It is 

not the individuality of the face that counts but the efficacy of the cipher-

ing it makes possible, and in what cases it makes it possible. This is an affair 

not of ideology but of economy and the organization of power (pouvoir). 

We are certainly not saying that the face, the power of the face (la puissance 
du visage), 
engenders and explains social power (pouvoir). Certain assem-
blages of power (pouvoir) require the production of a face, 
others do not. If 

we consider primitive societies, we see that there is very little that operates 

through the face: their semiotic is nonsignifying, nonsubjective, essentially 

collective, polyvocal, and corporeal, playing on very diverse forms and 

substances. This polyvocality operates through bodies, their volumes, 

their internal cavities, their variable exterior connections and coordinates 

(territorialities). A fragment from a manual semiotic, a manual sequence, 

may be coordinated, without subordination or unification, with an oral

 

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sequence, or a cutaneous one, or a rhythmic one, etc. Lizot, for example, 

shows how "the dissociation of duty, ritual and daily life is almost total... 

it is strange, inconceivable to us": during mourning behavior, certain 

people make obscene jokes while others cry; or an Indian abruptly stops 

crying and begins to repair his flute; or everybody goes to sleep. "The same 

goes for incest. There is no incest prohibition; instead, there are sequences 

of incest that connect with sequences of prohibition following specific 

coordinates. Paintings, tattoos, or marks on the skin embrace the 

multidi-mensionality of bodies. Even masks ensure the head's belonging 

to the body, rather than making it a face. Doubtless, there are profound 

movements of deterritorialization that shake up the coordinates of the 

body and outline particular assemblages of power; however, they connect 

the body not to faciality but to becomings-animal, in particular with the 

help of drugs. Of course, there is no less spirituality for that, for these 

becomings-animal involve an animal Spirit—a jaguar-spirit, bird-spirit, 

ocelot-spirit, toucan-spirit—that takes possession of the body's interior, 

enters its cavities, and fills its volumes instead of making a face for it. 

Possession expresses a direct relation between Voices and the body rather 

than a relation to the face. Shaman, warrior, and hunter organizations of 

power, fragile and precarious, are all the more spiritual by virtue of the 

fact that they operate through corporeality, animality, and vegetality. When 

we said earlier that the human head still belongs to the stratum of the 

organism, we obviously were not denying the existence of culture and 

society among these peoples; we were merely saying that these cultures' 

and societies' codes pertain to bodies, to the belonging of heads to bodies, 

to the ability of the body-head system to become and receive souls, and to 

receive them as friends while repulsing enemy souls. "Primitives" may 

have the most human of heads, the most beautiful and most spiritual, but 

they have no face and need none.

 

The reason is simple. The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the 

white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the 

black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical European, 

what Ezra Pound called the average sensual man, in short, the ordinary 

everyday Erotomaniac (nineteenth-century psychiatrists were right to say 

that erotomania, unlike nymphomania, often remains pure and chaste; 

this is because it operates through the face and facialization). Not a univer-

sal, but fades totius universi. Jesus Christ superstar: he invented the 

facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere (the Passion of 

Joan of Arc, in close-up). Thus the face is by nature an entirely specific 

idea, which did not preclude its acquiring and exercising the most general 

of functions: the function of biuni vocalization, or binarization. It has two 

aspects: the abstract machine of faciality, insofar as it is composed by a

 

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black hole/white wall system, functions in two ways, one of which concerns 

the units or elements, the other the choices. Under the first aspect, the 

black hole acts as a central computer, Christ, the third eye that moves 

across the wall or the white screen serving as general surface of reference. 

Regardless of the content one gives it, the machine constitutes a facial unit, 

an elementary face in biunivocal relation with another: it is a man or 

woman, a rich person or a poor one, an adult or a child, a leader or a subject, 

"an x or a y." The movement of the black hole across the screen, the trajec-

tory of the third eye over the surface of reference, constitutes so many 

dichotomies or arborescences, like four-eye machines made of elementary 

faces linked together two by two. The face of a teacher and a student, father 

and son, worker and boss, cop and citizen, accused and judge ("the judge 

had a stern expression, his eyes were horizonless..."): concrete individu-

alized faces are produced and transformed on the basis of these units, these 

combinations of units—like the face of a rich child in which a military call-

ing is already discernible, that West Point chin. You don't so much have a 

face as slide into one.

 

Under the second aspect, the abstract machine of faciality assumes a 

role of selective response, or choice: given a concrete face, the machine 

judges whether it passes or not, whether it goes or not, on the basis of the 

elementary facial units. This time, the binary relation is of the "yes-no" 

type. The empty eye or black hole absorbs or rejects, like a half-doddering 

despot who can still give a signal of acquiescence or refusal. The face of a 

given teacher is contorted by tics and bathed in an anxiety that makes it "no 

go." A defendant, a subject, displays an overaffected submission that turns 

into insolence. Or someone is too polite to be honest. A given face is neither 

a man's nor a woman's. Or it is neither a poor person's nor a rich person's. 

Is it someone who lost his fortune? At every moment, the machine rejects 

faces that do not conform, or seem suspicious. But only at a given level of 

choice. For it is necessary to produce successive divergence-types of devi-

ance for everything that eludes biunivocal relationships, and to establish 

binary relations between what is accepted on first choice and what is only 

tolerated on second, third choice, etc. The white wall is always expanding, 

and the black hole functions repeatedly. The teacher has gone mad, but 

madness is a face conforming to the «th choice (not the last, however, since 

there are mad faces that do not conform to what one assumes madness 

should be). A ha! It's not a man and it's not a woman, so it must be a 

trans-vestite: The binary relation is between the "no" of the first category 

and the "yes" of the following category, which under certain conditions may 

just as easily mark a tolerance as indicate an enemy to be mowed down at all 

costs. At any rate, you've been recognized, the abstract machine has you 

inscribed in its overall grid. It is clear that in its new role as deviance

 

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detector, the faciality machine does not restrict itself to individual cases 
but operates in just as general a fashion as it did in its first role, the compu-
tation of normalities. If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your aver-
age ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first 
divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second 
or third category. They are also inscribed on the wall, distributed by the 
hole. They must be Christianized, in other words, facialized. European 
racism as the white man's claim has never operated by exclusion, or by 
the designation of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive societies 
that the stranger is grasped as an "other."

12

 Racism operates by the 

determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, 
which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly 
eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places 
under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from 
the wall, which never abides alterity (it's a Jew, it's an Arab, it's a Negro, 
it's a lunatic . . .). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there 
are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us 
and whose crime it is not to be. The dividing line is not between inside 
and outside but rather is internal to simultaneous signifying chains and 
successive subjective choices. Racism never detects the particles of the 
other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist 
identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves to 
be identified at a given degree of divergence). Its cruelty is equaled only by 
its incompetence and naivete.

 

On the brighter side, painting has exploited all the resources of the 

Christ-face. Painting has taken the abstract white wall/black hole machine 
of faciality in all directions, using the face of Christ to produce every kind 
of facial unit and every degree of deviance. In this respect, there is an 
exultation in the painting of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, like an 
unbridled freedom. Not only did Christ preside over the facialization of 
the entire body (his own) and the landscapification of all milieus (his own), 
but he composed all of the elementary faces and had every divergence at his 
disposal: Christ-athlete at the fair, Christ-Mannerist queer, Christ-Negro, 
or at least a Black Virgin at the edge of the wall. The most prodigious 
strokes of madness appear on canvas under the auspices of the Catholic 
code. A single example chosen from many [Giotto, The Life of St. Francis, 
scene XII, The Transfiguration—Trans.]: against the white background of 
the landscape and the black-blue hole of the sky, the crucified 
Christ-turned-kite-machine sends stigmata to Saint Francis by rays; the 
stigmata effect the facialization of the body of the saint, in the image of the 
body of Christ; but the rays carrying the stigmata to the saint are also the 
strings Francis uses to pull the divine kite. It was under the sign of the 
cross

 

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that people learned to steer the face and processes of facialization in all 

directions.

 

Information theory takes as its point of departure a homogeneous set of 

ready-made signifying messages that are already functioning as elements 

in biunivocal relationships, or the elements of which are biunivocally 

organized between messages. Second, the picking of a combination 

depends on a certain number of subjective binary choices that increase pro-

portionally to the number of elements. But the problem is that all of this 

biunivocalization and binarization (which is not just the result of an 

increase in calculating skills, as some say) assumes the deployment of a wall 

or screen, the installation of a central computing hole without which no 

message would be discernible and no choice could be implemented. The 

black hole/white wall system must already have gridded all of space and 

outlined its arborescences or dichotomies for those of signifier and 

subjectification even to be conceivable. The mixed semiotic of signifiance 

and subjectification has an exceptional need to be protected from any 

intrusion from the outside. In fact, there must not be any exterior: no 

nomad machine, no primitive poly vocality must spring up, with their com-

binations of heterogeneous substances of expression. Translatability of 

any kind requires a single substance of expression. One can constitute sig-

nifying chains operating with deterritorialized, digitalized, discrete ele-

ments only if there is a semiological screen available, a wall to protect 

them. One can make subjective choices between two chains or at each point 

in a chain only if no outside tempest sweeps away the chains and subjects. 

One can form a web of subjectivities only if one possesses a central eye, a 

black hole capturing everything that would exceed or transform either the 

assigned affects or the dominant significations. Moreover, it is absurd to 

believe that language as such can convey a message. A language is always 

embedded in the faces that announce its statements and ballast them in 

relation to the signifiers in progress and subjects concerned. Choices are 

guided by faces, elements are organized around faces: a common grammar 

is never separable from a facial education. The face is a veritable mega-

phone. Thus not only must the abstract machine of faciality provide a pro-

tective screen and a computing black hole; in addition, the faces it 

produces draw all kinds of arborescences and dichotomies without which 

the signifying and the subjective would not be able to make the arbor-

escences and dichotomies function that fall within their purview in lan-

guage. Doubtless, the binarities and biunivocalities of the face are not the 

same as those of language, of its elements and subjects. There is no resem-

blance between them. But the former subtend the latter. When the faciality 

machine translates formed contents of whatever kind into a single sub-

stance of expression, it already subjugates them to the exclusive form of

 

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signifying and subjective expression. It carries out the prior gridding that 

makes it possible for the signifying elements to become discernible, and for 

the subjective choices to be implemented. The faciality machine is not an 

annex to the signifier and the subject; rather, it is subjacent (connexe) to 

them and is their condition of possibility. Facial biunivocalities and 

bina-rities double the others; facial redundancies are in redundancy with 

signifying and subjective redundancies. It is precisely because the face 

depends on an abstract machine that it does not assume a preexistent 

subject or signifier; but it is subjacent to them and provides the substance 

necessary to them. What chooses the faces is not a subject, as in the 

Szondi test; it is faces that choose their subjects. What interprets the 

black blotch/white hole figure, or the white page/black hole, is not a 

signifier, as in the Rorschach test; it is that figure which programs the 

signifiers.

 

We have made some progress toward answering the question of what 

triggers the abstract machine of faciality, for it is not in operation all the 

time or in just any social formation. Certain social formations need face, 

and also landscape.

13

 There is a whole history behind it. At very different 

dates, there occurred a generalized collapse of all of the heterogeneous, 

polyvocal, primitive semiotics in favor of a semiotic of signifiance and 

subjectification. Whatever the differences between signifiance and 

subjec-tification, whichever prevails over the other in this case or that, 

whatever the varying figures assumed by their de facto mixtures—they 

have it in common to crush all polyvocality, set up language as a form of 

exclusive expression, and operate by signifying biunivocalization and 

subjective binarization. The superlinearity proper to language is no 

longer coordinated with multidimensional figures: it now flattens out all 

volumes and subordinates all lines. Is it by chance that linguistics always, 

and very quickly, encounters the problem of homonymy, or ambiguous 

statements that it then subjects to a set of binary reductions? More 

generally, linguistics can tolerate no poly vocality or rhizome traits: a child 

who runs around, plays, dances, and draws cannot concentrate attention 

on language and writing, and will never be a good subject. In short, the 

new semiotic needs systematically to destroy the whole range of primitive 

semiotic systems, even if it retains some of their debris in well-defined 

enclosures.

 

However, there is more to the picture than semiotic systems waging war 

on one another armed only with their own weapons. Very specific assem-
blages of power impose signifiance and subjectification 
as their determinate 

form of expression, in reciprocal presupposition with new contents: there 

is no signifiance without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification with-

out an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without 

assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and 

subjects. It is these assemblages, these despotic or authoritarian forma-

 

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tions, that give the new semiotic system the means of its imperialism, in 

other words, the means both to crush the other semiotics and protect itself 

against any threat from outside. A concerted effort is made to do away with 

the body and corporeal coordinates through which the multidimensional 

or polyvocal semiotics operated. Bodies are disciplined, corporeality dis-

mantled, becomings-animal hounded out, deterritorialization pushed to a 

new threshold—a jump is made from the organic strata to the strata of 

signifiance and subjectification. A single substance of expression is pro-

duced. The white wall/black hole system is constructed, or rather the 

abstract machine is triggered that must allow and ensure the almightiness 

of the signifier as well as the autonomy of the subject. You will be pinned to 

the white wall and stuffed in the black hole. This machine is called the 

faciality machine because it is the social production of face, because it per-

forms the facialization of the entire body and all its surroundings and 

objects, and the landscapification of all worlds and milieus. The deter-

ritorialization of the body implies a reterritorialization on the face; the 

decoding of the body implies an overcoding by the face; the collapse of cor-

poreal coordinates or milieus implies the constitution of a landscape. The 

semiotic of the signifier and the subjective never operates through bodies. 

It is absurd to claim to relate the signifier to the body. At any rate it can be 

related only to a body that has already been entirely facialized. The differ-

ence between our uniforms and clothes and primitive paintings and garb is 

that the former effect a facialization of the body, with buttons for black 

holes against the white wall of the material. Even the mask assumes a new 

function here, the exact opposite of its old one. For there is no unitary func-

tion of the mask, except a negative one (in no case does the mask serve to 

dissimulate, to hide, even while showing or revealing). Either the mask 

assures the head's belonging to the body, its becoming-animal, as was the 

case in primitive societies. Or, as is the case now, the mask assures the erec-

tion, the construction of the face, the facialization of the head and the 

body: the mask is now the face itself, the abstraction or operation of the 

face. The inhumanity of the face. Never does the face assume a prior 

signifier or subject. The order is totally different: despotic and authoritar-

ian concrete assemblage of power —► triggering of the abstract machine of 

faciality, white wall/black hole —> installation of the new semiotic of 

signifiance and subjectification on that holey surface. That is why we have 

been addressing just two problems exclusively: the relation of the face to 

the abstract machine that produces it, and the relation of the face to the 

assemblages of power that require that social production. The face is a 

politics.

 

Of course, we have already seen that signifiance and subjectification are 

semiotic systems that are entirely distinct in their principles and have

 

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different regimes (circular irradiation versus segmentary linearity) and 

different apparatuses of power (despotic generalized slavery versus author-

itarian contract-proceeding). Neither begins with Christ, or the White 

Man as Christian universal: there are Indian, African, and Asiatic despotic 

formations of signifiance; the authoritarian process of subjectification 

appears most purely in the destiny of the Jewish people. But however dif-

ferent these semiotics are, they still form a de facto mix, and it is at the level 

of this mixture that they assert their imperialism, in other words, their 

common endeavor to crush all other semiotics. There is no signifiance that 

does not harbor the seeds of subjectivity; there is no subjectification that 

does not drag with it remnants of signifier. If the signifier bounces above all 

off a wall, if subjectivity spins above all toward a hole, then we must say that 

the wall of the signifier already includes holes and the black hole of subjec-

tivity already carries scraps of wall. The mix, therefore, has a solid founda-

tion in the indissociable white wall/black hole machine, and the two 

semiotics intermingle through intersection, splicing, and the plugging of 

one into the other, as with the "Hebrew and the Pharaoh." But there is more 

because the nature of the mixtures may vary greatly. If it is possible to 

assign the faciality machine a date—the year zero of Christ and the histori-

cal development of the White Man—it is because that is when the mixture 

ceased to be a splicing or an intertwining, becoming a total 

interpene-tration in which each element suffuses the other like drops of 

red-black wine in white water. Our semiotic of modern White Men, the 

semiotic of capitalism, has attained this state of mixture in which 

signifiance and subjectification effectively interpenetrate. Thus it is in 

this semiotic that faciality, or the white wall/black hole system, assumes 

its full scope. We must, however, assess the states of mixture and the 

varying proportions of the elements. Whether in the Christian or 

pre-Christian state, one element may dominate another, one may be more 

or less powerful than the other. We are thus led to define limit-faces, 

which are different from both the facial units and the degrees of facial 

divergence previously defined.

 

1. The black hole is on the white wall. It is not a unit, since the black hole 

is in constant movement on the wall and operates by binarization. Two 

black holes, four black holes, black holes distribute themselves like eyes. 

Faciality is always a multiplicity. The landscape will be populated with eyes 

or black holes, as in an Ernst painting, or a drawing by Aloi'se or Wolfli. Cir-

cles are drawn around a hole on the white wall; an eye can be placed in each 

of the circles. We can even propose the following law: the more circles there 

are around a hole, the more the bordering effect acts to increase the surface 

over which the hole slides and to give that surface a force of capture. Per-

haps the purest case is to be found in popular Ethiopian scrolls represent-

ing demons: on the white surface of the parchment, two black holes are

 

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YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY □ 183

 

drawn, or an outline of round or rectangular faces; but the black holes 

spread and reproduce, they enter into redundancy, and each time a secon-

dary circle is drawn, a new black hole is constituted, an eye is put in it.'

4

 An 

effect of capturing a surface that becomes more enclosed the more it 

expands. This is the signifying despotic face and the multiplication proper 

to it, its proliferation, its redundancy of frequency. A multiplication of 

eyes. The despot or his representatives are everywhere. This is the face as 

seen from the front, by a subject who does not so much see as get snapped 

up by black holes. This is a figure of destiny, terrestrial destiny, objective 

signifying destiny. The close-up in film knows this figure well: the Griffith 

close-up of a face, an element of a face or a facialized object, which then 

assumes an anticipatory temporal value (the hands of the clock fore-

shadow something).

 

 

Proliferation of Eyes By Multiplication of Border

 

Terrestrial Signifying Despotic Face

 

2. Now, on the contrary, the white wall has unraveled, becoming a silver 

thread moving toward the black hole. One black hole "crests" all the other 

black holes, all of the eyes and faces, while the landscape becomes a thread

 

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whose far end coils around the hole. It is still a multiplicity but constitutes a 

different figure of destiny: reflexive, passional, subjective destiny. It is the 
maritime face or landscape: it follows the line separating the sky from the 

waters, or the land from the waters. This authoritarian face is in profile and 

spins toward the black hole. Or else there are two faces facing each other, 

but in profile to the observer, and their union is already marked by a limit-

less separation. Or else the faces turn away from each other, swept away by 

betrayal. Tristan, Isolde, Isolde, Tristan, in the boat carrying them to the 

black hole of betrayal and death. A faciality of consciousness and passion, a 

redundancy of resonance and coupling. This time, the effect of the close-up 

is no longer to expand a surface while simultaneously closing it off; its only 

function is to have an anticipatory temporal value. It marks the origin of a 

scale of intensity, or is part of that scale; the closer the faces get to the black 

hole as termination point, the more the close-up heats the line they follow. 

Eisenstein's close-ups versus Griffith's (the intensive heightening of 

shame, or anger, in the close-ups in Potemkin).

15

 Here again, it is clear that 

any combination is possible between the two limit-figures of the face. In 

Pabst's  Lulu,  the despotic face of the fallen Lulu is associated with the 

image of a bread knife, which has the anticipatory value of foreshadowing 

the murder; but the authoritarian face of Jack the Ripper also ascends a 

whole scale of intensities leading to the knife and Lulu's murder.

 

More generally, we may note characteristics common to the two 

limit-figures. First, although the white wall, the broad cheeks, is the 

substantial element of the signifier, and the black hole the reflexive element 

of subjectivity, they always go together. But in one of two modes: either 

the black holes distribute themselves and multiply on the white wall, or 

the wall, reduced to its crest or horizon thread, hurtles toward a black 

hole that crests them all. There is no wall without black holes, and no 

black hole without a wall. Second, in both cases the black hole is 

necessarily surrounded by a border, or even bordered more than once: the 

effect of this border is either to expand the surface of the wall or to intensify 

the line. The black hole is never in the eyes (pupil); it is always inside the 

border, and the eyes are always inside the hole: dead eyes, which see all the 

better for being in a black hole.

16

 These common characteristics do not 

preclude the existence of a limit-difference between the two figures of the 

face, and proportions according to which first one then the other 

dominates in the mixed semiotic. The terrestrial signifying despotic face, 

the maritime subjective passional authoritarian face (the desert can also be 

a sea of land). Two figures of destiny, two states of the faciality machine. 

Jean Paris has clearly shown how these poles operate in painting, the pole 

of the despotic Christ and that of the passional Christ: on the one hand, 

the face of Christ seen from the front, as in a Byzantine mosaic, with the 

black hole of the eyes

 

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YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY D 185

 

against a gold background, all depth projected forward; and on the other 

hand, faces that cross glances and turned away from each other, seen 

half-turned or in profile, as in a quattrocento painting, their sidelong 

glances drawing multiple lines, integrating depth into the painting itself 

(arbitrary examples of transition and mixture can be cited, such a 

Duccio's Calling of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew, against the background of 

an aquatic landscape; the second formula has already overtaken Christ and 

the first fisherman, while the second fisherman remains within the Byzantine 

code).

17

 

 

Celebatory Machine

 

 

Maritime Subjective Authoritarian Face (after Tristan and Isolde)

 

Swann's Love: Proust was able to make the face, landscape, painting, 

music, etc., resonate together. Three moments in the story of Swann and 

Odette. First, a whole signifying mechanism is set up. The face of Odette 

with her broad white or yellow cheeks, and her eyes as black hoes. But this 

face continually refers back to other things, also arrayed on the wall. That is 

Swann's aetheticism, his amateurism: a thing must always recall some-

thing else, in a network of interpretations under the sign of the signifier. 

A face refers back to a landscape. A face must "recall" a painting, or a

 

Coupled Machine

 

Complex Machine

1.  Musicality Line 

2.  Picturality Line 

3.  Landscapity Line 

4.  Faciality Line 

5.  Consciousness Line 

6.  Passion Line 

Etc. 

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fragment of a painting. A piece of music must let fall a little phrase that 

connects with Odette's face, to the point that the little phrase becomes only 

a signal. The white wall becomes populous, the black holes are arrayed. 

This entire mechanism of signifiance, with its referral of interpretations, 

prepares the way for the second, passional subjective, moment, during 

which Swann's jealousy, querulous delusion, and erotomania develop. 

Now Odette's face races down a line hurtling toward a single black hole, 

that of Swann's Passion. The other lines, of landscapity, picturality, and 

musicality, also rush toward this catatonic hole and coil around it, border-

ing it several times.

 

But in the third moment, at the end of his long passion, Swann attends a 

reception where he sees the faces of the servants and guests disaggregate 

into autonomous aesthetic traits, as if the line of picturality regained its 

independence, both beyond the wall and outside the black hole. Then 

Vinteuil's little phrase regains its transcendence and renews its connection 

with a still more intense, asignifying, and asubjective line of pure musi-

cality. And Swann knows that he no longer loves Odette and, above all, that 

Odette will never again love him.

 

Was this salvation through art necessary? For neither Swann nor Proust 

was saved. Was it necessary to break through the wall and out of the hole in 
this way, by renouncing love? Was not that love rotten from the start, made 

of signifiance and jealousy? Was it possible to do anything else, considering 

Odette's mediocrity and Swann's aestheticism? In a way, the madeleine is 

the same story. The narrator munches his madeleine: redundancy, the 

black hole of involuntary memory. How can he get out of that? And it is, 

above all, something one has to get out of, escape from. Proust knows that 

quite well, even if his commentators do not. But the way he gets out is 

through art, uniquely through art.

 

How do you get out of the black hole? How do you break through the 

wall? How do you dismantle the face? Whatever genius there may be in the 

French novel, that is not its affair. It is too concerned with measuring the 

wall, or even with building it, with plumbing the depths of black holes and 

composing faces. The French novel is profoundly pessimistic and idealis-

tic, "critical of life rather than creative of life." It stuffs its characters down 

the hole and bounces them off the wall. It can only conceive of organized 

voyages, and of salvation only through art, a still Catholic salvation, in 

other words, salvation through eternity. It spends its time plotting points 

instead of drawing lines, active lines of flight or of positive 

deterritori-alization. The Anglo-American novel is totally different. "To 

get away. To get away, out!... To cross a horizon .. ."

18

 From Hardy to 

Lawrence, from Melville to Miller, the same cry rings out: Go across, get 

out, break through, make a beeline, don't get stuck on a point. Find the line 

of separation, fol-

 

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low it or create it, to the point of treachery. That is why their relationship to 

other civilizations, to the Orient or South America, and also to drugs and 

voyages in place, is entirely different from that of the French. They know 

how difficult it is to get out of the black hole of subjectivity, of conscious-

ness and memory, of the couple and conjugality. How tempting it is to let 

yourself get caught, to lull yourself into it, to latch back onto aface. "[Being] 

locked away in the black hole. . . gave her a molten copperish glow, the 

words coming out of her mouth like lava, her flesh clutching ravenously for 

a hold, a perch on something solid and substantial, something in which to 

reintegrate and repose for a few moments. ... At first I mistook it for pas-

sion, for ecstasy. ... I thought I had found a living volcano, a female 

Vesuvius. I never thought I had found a human ship going down in an 

ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of impotence. Now I think of that black star 

gleaming through the hole in the ceiling, that fixed star which hung above 

our conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute, and I know it 

was her, emptied of all that was properly herself: a dead black sun without 

aspect."

19

 A copperish glow like the face at the bottom of a black hole. The 

point is to get out of it, not in art, in other words, in spirit, but in life, in real 

life. Don't take away my power to love. These English and American authors 

also know how hard it is to break through the wall of the signifier. Many 

people have tried since Christ, beginning with Christ. But Christ himself 

botched the crossing, the jump, he bounced off the wall. "As if by a great 

recoil, this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole 

negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert 

mass to create the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible"—the 

Face.

20

 Cross the wall, the Chinese perhaps, but at what price? At the price 

of a becoming-animal, becoming-flower or rock, and beyond that a strange 
becoming-imperceptible,  a  becoming-hard now one with loving.

11

  It is a 

question of speed, even if the movement is in place. Is this also to dismantle 

the face, or as Miller says, no longer to look at or into the eyes but to swim 

through them, to close your own eyes and make your body a beam of light 

moving at ever-increasing speed? Of course, this requires all the resources 

of art, and art of the highest kind. It requires a whole line of writing, 

picturality, musicality... For it is through writing that you become animal, 

it is through color that you become imperceptible, it is through music that 

you become hard and memoryless, simultaneously animal and impercepti-

ble: in love. But art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life 

lines, in other words, all of those real becomings that are not produced only 
in art, and all of those active escapes that do not consist in fleeing into art, 

taking refuge in art, and all of those positive deterritorializations that 

never reterritorialize on art, but instead sweep it away with them toward 

the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless.

 

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Dismantling the face is no mean affair. Madness is a definite danger: Is it 

by chance that schizos lose their sense of the face, their own and others', 

their sense of the landscape, and the sense of language and its dominant sig-

nifications all at the same time? The organization of the face is a strong 

one. We could say that the face holds within its rectangle or circle a whole 

set of traits, faciality traits, which it subsumes and places at the service of 

signifiance and subjectification. What is a tic? It is precisely the continu-

ally refought battle between a faciality trait that tries to escape the sover-

eign organization of the face and the face itself, which clamps back down 

on the trait, takes hold of it again, blocks its line of flight, and reimposes its 

organization upon it. (There is a medical distinction between the clonic or 

convulsive tic and the tonic or spasmodic tic; perhaps we can say that in the 

first case the faciality trait that is trying to escape has the upper hand, 

whereas in the second case the facial organization that is trying to clamp 

back down or immobilize itself has the upper hand.) But if dismantling the 

face is a major affair, it is because it is not simply a question of tics, or an 

amateur's or aesthete's adventure. If the face is a politics, dismantling the 

face is also a politics involving real becomings, an entire 

becoming-clandestine. Dismantling the face is the same as breaking 

through the wall of the signifier and getting out of the black hole of 

subjectivity. Here, the program, the slogan, of schizoanalysis is: Find your 

black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way 

you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.

22

 

It is time once again to multiply practical warnings. First, it is never a 

question of a return to ... It is not a question of "returning" to the 

presignifying and presubjective semiotics of primitive peoples. We will 

always be failures at playing African or Indian, even Chinese, and no voy-

age to the South Seas, however arduous, will allow us to cross the wall, get 

out of the hole, or lose our face. We will never succeed in making ourselves a 

new primitive head and body, human, spiritual, and faceless. It would only 

be taking more photos and bouncing off the wall again. We will always find 

ourselves reterritorialized again. O my little desert island, on you I am in 

the Closerie des Lilas again, O my deep ocean, you reflect the lake in the 

Bois de Boulogne, O little phrase of Vinteuil, you recall a sweet moment. 

These are Eastern physical and spiritual exercises, but for a couple, like a 

conjugal bed tucked with a Chinese sheet: you did do your exercises today, 

didn't you? Lawrence has only one grudge against Melville: he knew better 

than anyone how to get across the face, the eyes and horizon, the wall and 

hole, but he mistook that crossing, that creative line, for an "impossible 

return," a return to the savages in Typee, for a way of staying an artist and 

hating life, of maintaining a nostalgia for the Home Country. ("He ever 

pined for Home and Mother, the two things he had run away from as far as

 

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ships would carry him.... Melville came home to face out the rest of his 

life.... He refused life. But he stuck to his ideal of perfect relationship, pos-

sible perfect love.... A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party 

leaves great tracts unknown in the other party.. . . Melville was, at the core, 

a mystic and an idealist.... And he stuck to his ideal guns. I abandon mine. 

I say, let the old guns rot. Get new ones, and shoot straight.")

23,

 

We can't turn back. Only neurotics, or, as Lawrence says, "renegades," 

deceivers, attempt a regression. The white wall of the signifier, the black 

hole of subjectivity, and the facial machine are impasses, the measure of 

our submissions and subjections; but we are born into them, and it is there 

we must stand battle. Not in the sense of a necessary stage, but in the sense 

of a tool for which a new use must be invented. Only across the wall of the 

signifier can you run lines of asignifiance that void all memory, all return, 

all possible signification and interpretation. Only in the black hole of 

subjective consciousness and passion do you discover the transformed, 

heated, captured particles you must relaunch for a nonsubjective, living 

love in which each party connects with unknown tracts in the other without 

entering or conquering them, in which the lines composed are broken lines. 

Only on your face and at the bottom of your black hole and upon your white 

wall will you be able to set faciality traits free like birds, not in order to 

return to a primitive head, but to invent the combinations by which those 

traits connect with landscapity traits that have themselves been freed from 

the landscape and with traits of picturality and musicality that have also 

been freed from their respective codes. With what joy the painters used the 

face of Christ himself, taking it in every sense and direction; and it was not 

simply the joy of a desire to paint, but the joy of all desires. Is it possible to 

tell, when the knight of the courtly novel is in his catatonic state, whether 

he is deep in his black hole or already astride the particles that will carry 

him out of it to begin a new journey? Lawrence, who has been compared to 

Lancelot, writes: "To be alone, mindless and memoryless beside the sea... 

As alone and as absent and as present as an aboriginal dark on the sand in 

the sun ... Far off, far off, as if he had landed on another planet, as a man 

might after death. . . The landscape?—he cared not a thing about the land-

scape. . . . Humanity?—there was none. Thought?—fallen like a stone into 

the sea. The great, the glamorous past?—worn thin, frail, like a frail trans-

lucent film of shell thrown up on the shore."

24

 The uncertain moment at 

which the white wall/black hole, black point/white shore system, as on a 

Japanese print, itself becomes one with the act of leaving it, breaking away 

from and crossing through it.

 

We have seen that the abstract machine has two very different states: 

sometimes it is taken up in strata where it brings about 

deterritorial-izations that are merely relative, or deterritorializations that 

are absolute

 

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YEAR ZERO: FACIALITY

 

but remain negative; sometimes it is developed on a plane of consistency 

giving it a "diagrammatic" function, a positive value of 

deterritorial-ization, the ability to form new abstract machines. Sometimes 

the abstract machine, as the faciality machine, forces flows into 

signifiances and subjectifications, into knots of aborescence and holes of 

abolition; sometimes, to the extent that it performs a veritable 

"defacialization," it frees something like probe-heads {fetes chercheuses, 

guidance devices) that dismantle the strata in their wake, break through the 

walls of signifiance, pour out of the holes of subjectivity, fell trees in favor 

of veritable rhizomes, and steer the flows down lines of positive 

deterritorializaton or creative flight. There are no more concentrically 

organized strata, no more black holes around which lines coil to form 

borders, no more walls to which dichotomies, binarities, and bipolar 

values cling. There is no more face to be in redundancy with a landscape, 

painting, or little phrase of music, each perpetually bringing the other to 

mind, on the unified surface of the wall or the central swirl of the black 

hole. Each freed faciality trait forms a rhizome with a freed trait of 

landscapity, picturality, or musicality. This is not a collection of 

part-objects but a living block, a connecting of stems by which the traits 

of a face enter a real multiplicity or diagram with a trait of an unknown 

landscape, a trait of painting or music that is thereby effectively produced, 

created, according to quanta of absolute, positive 

deterritori-alization—not  evoked or recalled according to systems of 

reterritorializa-tion. A wasp trait and an orchid trait. Quanta marking so 

many mutations of abstract machines, each of which operates as a 

function of the other. Thus opens a rhizomatic realm of possibility 

effecting the potentialization of the possible, as opposed to arborescent 

possibility, which marks a closure, an impotence.

 

The face, what a horror. It is naturally a lunar landscape, with its pores, 

planes, matts, bright colors, whiteness, and holes: there is no need for a 

close-up to make it inhuman; it is naturally a close-up, and naturally 

inhuman, a monstrous hood. Necessarily so because it is produced by a 

machine and in order to meet the requirements of the special apparatus of 

power that triggers the machine and takes deterritorialization to the abso-

lute while keeping it negative. Earlier, when we contrasted the primitive, 

spiritual, human head with the inhuman face, we were falling victim to a 

nostalgia for a return or regression. In truth, there are only inhumanities, 

humans are made exclusively of inhumanities, but very different ones, of 

very different natures and speeds. Primitive inhumanity, prefacial inhu-

manity, has all the polyvocality of a semiotic in which the head is a part of 

the body, a body that is already deterritorialized relatively and plugged 

into becomings-spiritual/animal. Beyond the face lies an altogether differ-

ent inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of "probe-heads";

 

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here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of 

deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becom-

ings, new polyvocalities. Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere, 

for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created. Face, my love, you have 

finally become a probe-head... Year zen, year omega, year co... Must we 

leave it at that, three states, and no more: primitive heads, Christ-face, and 

probe-heads?

 

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8.   1874: Three Novellas, or 

'What Happened?"

 

 

It is not very difficult to determine the essence of the "novella" as a literary 

genre: Everything is organized around the question, "What happened? 

Whatever could have happened?" The tale is the opposite of the novella, 

because it is an altogether different question that the reader asks with bated 

breath: What is going to happen? Something is always going to happen, 

come to pass. Something always happens in the novel also, but the novel 

integrates elements of the novella and the tale into the variation of its 

perpetual living present (duration). The detective novel is a particularly 

hybrid genre in this respect, since most often the something = Xthat has 

happened is on the order of a murder or theft, but exactly what it is that has 

happened remains to be discovered, and in the present determined by the 

model detective. Yet it would be an error to reduce these different aspects 

to the three dimensions of time. Something happened, something is going 

to happen, can designate a past so immediate, a future so near, that they are 

one (as Husserl would say) with retentions and protentions of the present

 

192

 

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itself. Nevertheless, the distinction is legitimate, in view of the different 

movements that animate the present, are contemporaneous with it: One 

moves with it, another already casts it into the past from the moment it is 

present (novella), while another simultaneously  draws it into the future 

(tale). We are lucky to have treatments of the same subject by a tale writer 

and a novella writer: two lovers, one of whom dies suddenly in the other's 

room. In Maupassant's tale, "Une ruse" (An artifice), everything revolves 

around these questions: What is going to happen? How will the survivor 

extricate himself from the situation? What will the third party-savior, in 

this case a doctor, think of? In Barbey d'Aurevilly's novella, "Le rideau 

cramoisi" (The crimson curtain), everything revolves around: Something 

happened, but what? That is the question, not only because it is really not 

known what the cold young woman just died from, but also because it will 

never be known why she gave herself to the petty officer, or how the third 

party-savior, here the colonel of the regiment, was able to arrange things.

1

 It 

should not be thought that it is easier to leave things open-ended: for there 

to be something that has happened that we will never know about, or even 

several things in a row, requires no less minute attention and precision than 

the contrary case, when the author must invent the details of what will need 

to be known. You will never know what just happened, or you will always 

know what is going to happen: these are the reasons for the reader's two 

bated breaths, in the novella and the tale, respectively, and they are two 

ways in which the living present is divided at every instant. In the novella, 

we do not wait for something to happen, we expect something to have just 

happened. The novella is a last novella, whereas the tale is a first tale. The 

"presence" of the tale writer is completely different from that of the novella 

writer (and both are different from that of the novelist). Let us not dwell too 

much on the dimensions of time: the novella has little to do with a memory 

of the past or an act of reflection; quite to the contrary, it plays upon a fun-

damental forgetting. It evolves in the element of "what happened" because 

it places us in a relation with something unknowable and imperceptible 

(and not the other way around: it is not because it speaks of a past about 

which it can no longer provide us knowledge). It may even be that nothing 

has happened, but it is precisely that nothing that makes us say, Whatever 

could have happened to make me forget where I put my keys, or whether I 

mailed that letter, etc.? What little blood vessel in my brain could have rup-

tured? What is this nothing that makes something happen? The novella has 

a fundamental relation to secrecy (not with a secret matter or object to be 

discovered, but with the form of the secret, which remains impenetrable), 

whereas the tale has a relation to discovery (the form of discovery, indepen-

dent of what can be discovered). The novella also enacts postures of the 

body and mind that are like folds or envelopments, whereas the tale puts

 

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into play attitudes or positions that are like unfoldings and developments, 

however unexpected. Barbey has an evident fondness for body posture, in 

other words, states of the body when it is surprised by something that just 

happened. In the preface to the Diaboliques,  Barbey even suggests that 

there is a diabolism of body postures, a sexuality, pornography, and 

scatol-ogy of postures quite different from those that also, and 

simultaneously, mark body attitudes or positions. Posture is like inverse 

suspense. Thus it is not a question of saying that the novella relates to the 

past and the tale to the future; what we should say instead is that the novella 

relates, in the present itself, to the formal dimension of something that has 

happened, even if that something is nothing or remains unknowable. 

Similarly, one should not try to make the distinction between the novella 

and the tale coincide with categories such as the fantastic, the fabulous, 

etc.; that is another problem, there is no reason why it should overlap. The 

links of the novella are: What happened? (the modality or expression), 

Secrecy (the form), Body Posture (the content).

 

Take Fitzgerald. He is a tale and novella writer of genius. He is a novella 

writer when he asks himself, Whatever could have happened for things to 
have come to this? He 
is the only one who has been able to carry this ques-

tion to such a point of intensity. It is not a question of memory, reflection, 

old age, or fatigue, whereas the tale would deal with childhood, action, or 

impulse. Yet it is true that Fitzgerald only asks himself the question of the 

novella writer when he is personally worn-out, fatigued, sick, or even worse 

off. But once again, there is not necessarily a connection: it can also be a 

question of vigor, or love. It still is, even in desperate conditions. It is better 

to think of it as an affair of perception: you enter a room and perceive 

something as already there, as just having happened, even though it has not 

yet been done. Or you know that what is in the process of happening is hap-

pening for the last time, it's already over with. You hear an "I love you" you 

know is the last one. Perceptual semiotics. God, whatever could have hap-

pened, even though everything is and remains imperceptible, and in order 

for everything to be and remain imperceptible forever?

 

Not only is there a specificity of the novella, but there is also a specific 

way in which the novella treats a universal matter. For we are made of lines. 

We are not only referring to lines of writing. Lines of writing conjugate with 

other lines, life lines, lines of luck or misfortune, lines productive of the 

variation of the line of writing itself, lines that are between the lines of writ-

ing. Perhaps the novella has its own way of giving rise to and combining 

these lines, which nonetheless belong to everyone and every genre. 

Vladimir Propp has said, with great solemnity, that the folktale must be 

defined in terms of external and internal movements that it qualifies, for-

malizes, and combines in its own specific way.

2

 We would like to demon-

 

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strate that the novella is defined by living lines, flesh lines, about which it 

brings a special revelation. Marcel Arland is correct to say that the novella 

"is nothing but pure lines right down to the nuances, and nothing but the 

pure and conscious power of the word."

3

 

First Novella: "In the Cage," Henry James

 

The heroine, a young telegrapher, leads a very clear-cut, calculated life pro-

ceeding by delimited segments: the telegrams she takes one after the other, 

day after day; the people to whom she sends the telegrams; their social class 

and the different ways they use telegraphy; the words to be counted. More-

over, her telegraphist's cage is like a contiguous segment to the grocery 

store next door, where her fiance works. Contiguity of territories. And the 

fiance is constantly plotting out their future, work, vacations, house. Here, 

as for all of us, there is a line of rigid segmentarity on which everything 

seems calculable and foreseen, the beginning and end of a segment, the pas-

sage from one segment to another. Our lives are made like that: Not only 

are the great molar aggregates segmented (States, institutions, classes), but 

so are people as elements of an aggregate, as are feelings as relations 

between people; they are segmented, not in such a way as to disturb or dis-

perse, but on the contrary to ensure and control the identity of each agency, 

including personal identity. The fiance can say to the young woman, Even 

though there are differences between our segments, we have the same tastes 

and we are alike. I am a man, you are a woman; you are a telegraphist, I am a 

grocer; you count words, I weigh things; our segments fit together, conju-

gate. Conjugality. A whole interplay of well-determined, well-planned ter-

ritories. They have a future but no becoming. This is the first life line, the 
molar or rigid line of segmentarity; in no sense is it dead, for it occupies and 

pervades our life, and always seems to prevail in the end. It even includes 

much tenderness and love. It would be too easy to say, "This is a bad line," 

for you find it everywhere, and in all the other lines.

 

A rich couple comes into the post office and reveals to the young woman, 

or at least confirms, the existence of another life: coded, multiple tele-

grams, signed with pseudonyms. It is hard to tell who is who anymore, or 

what anything means. Instead of a rigid line composed of well-determined 

segments, telegraphy now forms a supple flow marked by quanta that are 

like so many little segmentations-in-progress grasped at the moment of 

their birth, as on a moonbeam, or on an intensive scale. Thanks to her "pro-

digious talent for interpretation," the young woman grasps that the man 

has a secret that has placed him in danger, deeper and deeper in danger, in a 

dangerous posture. It does not just have to do with his love relations with 

the woman. James has reached the stage in his work when it is no longer the

 

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matter of the secret that interests him, even if he has succeeded in render-
ing it entirely banal and unimportant. Now what counts is the form of the 
secret; the matter no longer even has to be discovered (we never find out, 
there are several possibilities, there is an objective indetermination, a kind 
of molecularization of the secret). In relation to this man, directly with 
him, the young telegraphist develops a strange passional complicity, a 
whole intense molecular life that does not even enter into rivalry with the 
life she leads with her fiance. What has happened, whatever could have 
happened? This life, however, is not in her head, it is not imaginary. Rather, 
we should say that there are two politics involved, as the young woman sug-
gests in a remarkable conversation with her fiance: a macropohtics and a 
micropolitics that do not envision classes, sexes, people, or feelings in at all 
the same way. Or again, there are two very different types of relations: 
intrinsic relations of couples involving well-determined aggregates or ele-
ments (social classes, men and women, this or that particular person), and 
less localizable relations that are always external to themselves and instead 
concern flows and particles eluding those classes, sexes, and persons. Why 
are the latter relations of doubles rather than of couples? "She was literally 
afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside. He might be wait-
ing; it was he who was her alternate self, and of him she was afraid."

4

 In any 

case, this line is very different from the previous one; it is a line of molecu-
lar or supple segmentation 
the segments of which are like quanta of 
deterritorialization. It is on this line that a present is defined whose very 
form is the form of something that has already happened, however close 
you might be to it, since the ungraspable matter of that something is 
entirely molecularized, traveling at speeds beyond the ordinary thresholds 
of perception. Yet we will not say that it is necessarily better.

 

There is no question that the two lines are constantly interfering, react-

ing upon each other, introducing into each other either a current of supple-
ness or a point of rigidity. Nathalie Sarraute, in her essay on the novel, 
praises English novelists, not only for discovering (as did Proust and 
Dostoyevsky) the great movements, territories, and points of the uncon-
scious that allow us to regain time or revive the past, but also for 
inopportunely following these molecular lines, simultaneously present and 
imperceptible. She shows that dialogue or conversation does indeed com-
ply with the breaks of a fixed segmentarity, with vast movements of regu-
lated distribution corresponding to the attitudes and positions of each of 
us; but also that they are run through and swept up by micromovements, 
fine segmentations distributed in an entirely different way, unfindable par-
ticles of an anonymous matter, tiny cracks and postures operating by dif-
ferent agencies even in the unconscious, secret lines of disorientation or

 

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deterritorialization: as she puts it, a whole subconversation within conver-

sation, in other words, a micropolitics of conversation.

5

 

Then James's heroine reaches a sort of maximum quantum in her sup-

ple segmentarity or line of flow beyond which she cannot go (even if she 

wanted to, there is no going further). There is a danger that these vibrations 

traversing us may be aggravated beyond our endurance. What happened? 

The molecular relation between the telegraphist and the telegraph sender 

dissolved in the form of the secret—because nothing happened. Each of 

them is propelled toward a rigid segmentarity: he will marry the 

now-widowed lady, she will marry her fiance. And yet everything has 

changed. She has reached something like a new line, a third type, a kind 

of line of flight that is just as real as the others even if it occurs in place: 

this line no longer tolerates segments; rather, it is like an exploding of the 

two segmentary series. She has broken through the wall, she has gotten out 

of the black holes. She has attained a kind of absolute deterritorialization. 

"She ended up knowing so much that she could no longer interpret any-

thing.  There were no longer shadows to help her see more clearly, only 
glare."

6

  You cannot go further in life than this sentence by James. The 

nature of the secret has changed once again. Undoubtedly, the secret 

always has to do with love, and sexuality. But previously it was either only a 

hidden matter given in the past (the better hidden the more ordinary it 

was), and we did not exactly know what form to give it: See, I am bending 

under the burden of my secret, see what mystery resides within me. It was a 

way of seeming interesting, what D. H. Lawrence called "the dirty little 

secret," my Oedipus, in a way. Or else the secret became the form of some-

thing whose matter was molecularized, imperceptible, unassignable: not a 

given of the past but the ungivable "What happened?" But on this third line 

there is no longer even any form—nothing but a pure abstract line. It is 

because we no longer have anything to hide that we can no longer be appre-

hended. To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in 

order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order 

finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A 

clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody 

else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be 

nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray. As 

Kierkegaard says, nothing distinguishes the knight of the faith from a bour-

geois German going home or to the post office: he sends off no special tele-

graphic sign; he constantly produces or reproduces finite segments, yet he 

is already moving on a line no one even suspects.

7

 In any case, the tele-

graphic line is not a symbol, and it is not simple. There are at least three of 

them: a line of rigid and clear-cut segmentarity; a line of molecular 

segmentarity; and an abstract line, a line of flight no less deadly and no less

 

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alive than the others. On the first line, there are many words and conversa-

tions, questions and answers, interminable explanations, precisions; the 

second is made of silences, allusions, and hasty innuendos inviting 

interpretation. But if the third line flashes, if the line of flight is like a train 

in motion, it is because one jumps linearly on it, one can finally speak 

"literally" of anything at all, a blade of grass, a catastrophe or sensation, 

calmly accepting that which occurs when it is no longer possible for any-

thing to stand for anything else. The three lines, however, continually 

intermingle.

 

Second Novella: "The 

Crack-up," F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

What happened? This is the question Fitzgerald keeps coming back to 

toward the end, having remarked that "of course all life is a process of 

breaking down."

8

 How should we understand this "of course"? We can say, 

first of all, that life is always drawn into an increasingly rigid and desic-

cated segmentarity. For the writer Fitzgerald, voyages, with their clear-cut 

segments, had lost their usefulness. There was also, from segment to seg-

ment, the depression, loss of wealth, fatigue and growing old, alcoholism, 

the failure of conjugality, the rise of the cinema, the advent of fascism and 

Stalinism, and the loss of success and talent—at the very moment 

Fitzgerald would find his genius. " The big sudden blows that come, or seem 
to come, from outside" 
(p. 69), and proceed by oversignificant breaks, mov-

ing us from one term to the other according to successive binary "choices": 

rich/poor... Even when change runs in the other direction, there is nothing 

to compensate for the rigidification, the aging that overcodes everything 

that occurs. This is a line of rigid segmentarity bringing masses into play, 

even if it was supple to begin with.

 

But Fitzgerald says that there is another type of cracking, with an en-

tirely different segmentarity. Instead of great breaks, these are 

micro-cracks, as in a dish; they are much more subtle and supple, and occur 
when things are going well on the other side. 
If there is aging on this line, it is 

not of the same kind: when you age on this line you don't feel it on the 

other line, you don't notice it on the other line until after "it" has already 

happened on this line. At such a moment, which does not correspond to any 

of the ages of the other line, you reach a degree, a quantum, an intensity 

beyond which you cannot go. (It's a very delicate business, these 

intensities: the finest intensity becomes harmful if it overtaxes your 

strength at a given moment; you have to be able to take it, you have to be in 

shape.) But what exactly happened? In truth, nothing assignable or 

perceptible: molecular changes, redistributions of desire such that when 

something occurs, the self that

 

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awaited it is already dead, or the one that would await it has not yet arrived. 

This time, there are outbursts and crackings in the immanence of a rhi-

zome, rather than great movements and breaks determined by the tran-

scendence of a tree. The crack-up "happens almost without your knowing it 

but is realized suddenly indeed" (p. 69). This molecular line, more supple 

but no less disquieting, in fact, much more disquieting, is not simply inter-

nal or personal: it also brings everything into play, but on a different scale 

and in different forms, with segmentations of a different nature, 

rhizomatic instead of arborescent. A micropolitics.

 

There is, in addition, a third line, which is like a line of rupture or a 

"clean break" and marks the exploding of the other two, their shake-up... 

in favor of something else? "This led me to the idea that the ones who had 

survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no 

parallel to a jailbreak when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be 

forced back to the old one" (p. 81). Here, Fitzgerald contrasts rupture with 

structural pseudobreaks in so-called signifying chains. But he also distin-

guishes it from more supple, more subterranean links or stems of the "voy-

age" type, or even from molecular conveyances. "The famous 'Escape' or 

'run away from it all' is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the 

South Seas, which are only for those who want to paint them or sail them. A 

clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable 

because it makes the past cease to exist" (p. 81). Can it be that voyages are 

always a return to rigid segmentarity? Is it always your daddy and mommy 

that you meet when you travel, even as far away as the South Seas, like 

Melville? Hardened muscles? Must we say that supple segmentarity itself 

reconstructs the great figures it claimed to escape, but under the micro-

scope, in miniature? Beckett's unforgettable line is an indictment of all 

voyages: " We don't travel for the fun of it, as far as I know; we're foolish, but 
not that foolish."

 

In rupture, not only has the matter of the past volitized; the form of what 

happened, of an imperceptible something that happened in a volatile mat-

ter, no longer even exists. One has become imperceptible and clandestine 

in motionless voyage. Nothing can happen, or can have happened, any 

longer. Nobody can do anything for or against me any longer. My territories 

are out of grasp, not because they are imaginary, but the opposite: because I 

am in the process of drawing them. Wars, big and little, are behind me. Voy-

ages, always in tow to something else, are behind me. I no longer have any 

secrets, having lost my face, form, and matter. I am now no more than a 

line. I have become capable of loving, not with an abstract, universal love, 

but a love I shall choose, and that shall choose me, blindly, my double, just 

as selfless as I. One has been saved by and for love, by abandoning love and 

self. Now one is no more than an abstract line, like an arrow crossing the

 

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void. Absolute deterritorialization. One has become like everybody/the 

whole world (tout le monde), but in a way that can become like everybody/ 

the whole world. One has painted the world on oneself, not oneself on the 

world. It should not be said that the genius is an extraordinary person, nor 

that everybody has genius. The genius is someone who knows how to make 

everybody/the whole world a becoming (Ulysses, perhaps: Joyce's failed 

ambition, Pound's near-success). One has entered becomings-animal, 

becomings-molecular, and finally becomings-imperceptible. "I was off the 

dispensing end of the relief roll forever. The heady villainous feeling con-

tinued. ... I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw me a 

bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand."

9

 Why such a 

despairing tone? Does not the line of rupture or true flight have its own 

danger, one worse than the others? Time to die. In any case, Fitzgerald pro-

poses a distinction between the three lines traversing us and composing "a 

life" (after Maupassant). Break line, crack line, rupture line. The line of 

rigid segmentarity with molar breaks; the line of supple segmentation with 

molecular cracks; the line of flight or rupture, abstract, deadly and alive, 

nonsegmentary.

 

Third Novella: "The Story of the 

Abyss and the Spyglass," Pierrette Fleutiaux

10

 

Some segments are more or less near, and others more or less distant. The 

segments seem to encircle an abyss, a kind of huge black hole. On each seg-

ment there are two kinds of lookouts, near-seers and far-seers. What they 

watch for are the movements, outbursts, infractions, disturbances, and 

rebellions occurring in the abyss. But there is a major difference between 

the two types of lookouts. The near-seers have a simple spyglass. In the 

abyss, they see the outline of gigantic cells, great binary divisions, dichoto-

mies, well-defined segments of the type "classroom, barracks, low-income 

housing project, or even countryside seen from an airplane." They see 

branches, chains, rows, columns, dominoes, striae. Once in a while along 

the edges they discover a misshapen figure or a shaky contour. Then they 

bring out the terrible Ray Telescope. It is used not to see with but to cut 

with, to cut out shapes. This geometrical instrument, which emits a laser 

beam, assures the dominion of the great signifying break everywhere and 

restores the momentarily threatened molar order. The cutting telescope 
overcodes everything; it acts on flesh and blood, but itself is nothing but 

pure geometry, as a State affair, and the near-seers' physics in the service of 

that machine. What is geometry, what is the State, and what are the 

near-seers? These are meaningless questions ("I am speaking literally") 

because it is not so much a question of defining something as effectively 

drawing a

 

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line; not a line of writing but a line of rigid segmentarity along which every-

one will be judged and rectified according to his or her contours, individual 

or collective.

 

Very different is the situation of those with long-distance vision, the 

far-seers, with all their ambiguities. There are very few of them, at most one 

per segment. Their telescopes are complex and refined. But they are in no 

way leaders. And what they see is entirely different from what the others 

see. They see a whole microsegmentarity, details of details, "a roller 

coaster of possibilities," tiny movements that have not reached the edge, 

lines or vibrations that start to form long before there are outlined shapes, 

"segments that move by jerks." A whole rhizome, a molecular 

segmentarity that does not permit itself to be overcoded by a signifier 

like the cutting machine, or even to be attributed to a given figure, a given 

aggregate or element. This second line is inseparable from the anonymous 

segmentation that produces it and challenges everything all the time, 

without goal or reason: "What happened?" The far-seers can divine the 

future, but always in the form of a becoming of something that has already 

happened in a molecular matter; unfindable particles. The situation is the 

same in biology: the great cellular divisions and dichotomies, with their 

contours, are accompanied by migrations, invaginations, displacements, 

and morphogenetic impulses whose segments are marked not by 

localizable points but by thresholds of intensity passing underneath, 

mitoses that scramble everything, and molecular lines that intersect each 

other within the large-scale cells and between their breaks. The situation is 

the same in a society: rigid segments and overcutting segments are 

crosscut underneath by segmentations of another nature. But this is 

neither one nor the other, neither biology nor a society; nor is it a 

resemblance between the two: "I am speaking literally," I am drawing 

lines, lines of writing, and life passes between the lines. A line of supple 

segmentarity formed and became entangled with the other, but it was a 

very different kind of line, shakily drawn by the micro-politics of the 

far-seers. It is a political affair, as worldwide in scope as the other, but on a 

scale and in a form that is incommensurable, nonsuperpos-able. It is also a 

perceptual affair, for perception always goes hand in hand with semiotics, 

practice, politics, theory. One sees, speaks and thinks on a given scale, 

and according to a given line that may or may not conjugate with the 

other's line, even if the other is still oneself. If it does not, then you should 

not insist, you should not argue; you should flee, flee, even saying as you go, 

"Okay, okay, you win." It's no use talking; you first have to change 

telescopes, mouths, and teeth, all of the segments. Not only does one speak 

literally, one also lives literally, in other words, following lines, whether 

connectable or not, even heterogeneous ones. Sometimes it doesn't work 

when they are homogeneous."

 

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The ambiguity of the far-seers' situation is that they are able to detect the 

slightest microinfraction in the abyss, things the others do not see; they also 

observe, beneath its apparent geometrical justice, the dreadful damage 

caused by the Cutting Telescope. They feel as though they foresee things 

and are ahead of the others because they see the smallest thing as already 

having happened; but they know that their warnings are to no avail because 

the cutting telescope will set everything straight without being warned, 

without the need for or possibility of prediction. At times they feel that 

they do indeed see something the others do not, but at other times that 

what they see differs only in degree and serves no purpose. Although they 

are collaborators with the most rigid and cruelest project of control, how 

could they not feel a vague sympathy for the subterranean activity revealed 

to them? An ambiguity in the molecular line, as if it vacillated between two 
sides. 
One day (what will have happened?), a far-seer will abandon his or 

her segment and start walking across a narrow overpass above the dark 

abyss, will break his or her telescope and depart on a line of flight to meet a 

blind Double approaching from the other side.

 

Individual or group, we are traversed by lines, meridians, geodesies, 

tropics, and zones marching to different beats and differing in nature. We 

said that we are composed of lines, three kinds of lines. Or rather, of bun-

dles of lines, for each kind is multiple. We may be more interested in a cer-

tain line than in the others, and perhaps there is indeed one that is, not 

determining, but of greater importance . . . if it is there. For some of these 

lines are imposed on us from outside, at least in part. Others sprout up 

somewhat by chance, from a trifle, why we will never know. Others can be 

invented, drawn, without a model and without chance: we must invent our 

lines of flight, if we are able, and the only way we can invent them is by 

effectively drawing them, in our lives. Aren't lines of flight the most diffi-

cult of all? Certain groups or people have none and never will. Certain 

groups or people lack a given kind of line, or have lost it. The painter Flor-

ence Julien has a special interest in lines of flight: she invented a procedure 

by which she extracts from photographs lines that are nearly abstract and 

formless. But once again, there is a bundle of very diverse lines: the line of 

flight of children leaving school at a run is different from that of demon-

strators chased by the police, or of a prisoner breaking out. There are differ-

ent animal lines of flight: each species, each individual, has its own. 

Fernand Deligny transcribes the lines and paths of autistic children by 

means of maps: he carefully distinguishes "lines of drift" and "customary 

lines." This does not only apply to walking; he also makes maps of percep-

tions and maps of gestures (cooking or collecting wood) showing custom-

ary gestures and gestures of drift. The same goes for language, if it is

 

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present. Deligny opened his lines of writing to life lines. The lines are con-

stantly crossing, intersecting for a moment, following one another. A line of 

drift intersects a customary line, and at that point the child does something 

not quite belonging to either one: he or she finds something he or she lost— 

what happened?—or jumps and claps his or her hands, a slight and rapid 

movement—and that gesture in turn emits several lines.'

2

 In short, there is 

a line of flight, which is already complex since it has singularities; and there 
a customary or molar line with segments; and between the two (?), there is a 
molecular line with quanta that cause it to tip to one side or the other.

 

As Deligny says, it should be borne in mind that these lines mean noth-

ing. It is an affair of cartography. They compose us, as they compose our 

map. They transform themselves and may even cross over into one 

another. Rhizome. It is certain that they have nothing to do with language; 

it is, on the contrary, language that must follow them, it is writing that must 

take sustenance from them, between its own lines. It is certain that they 

have nothing to do with a signifier, the determination of a subject by the 

signifier; instead, the signifier arises at the most rigidified level of one of 

the lines, and the subject is spawned at the lowest level. It is certain that 

they have nothing to do with a structure, which is never occupied by any-

thing more than points and positions, by arborescences, and which always 

forms a closed system, precisely in order to prevent escape. Deligny 

invokes a common Body upon which these lines are inscribed as so many 

segments, thresholds, or quanta, territorialities, deterritorializations, or 

reterritorializations. The lines are inscribed on a Body without Organs, 

upon which everything is drawn and flees, which is itself an abstract line 

with neither imaginary figures nor symbolic functions: the real of the BwO. 
This body is the only practical object of schizoanalysis: What is your body 

without organs? What are your lines? What map are you in the process of 

making or rearranging? What abstract line will you draw, and at what price, 

for yourself and for others? What is your line of flight? What is your BwO, 

merged with that line? Are you cracking up? Are you going to crack up? Are 

you deterritorializing? Which lines are you severing, and which are you 

extending or resuming? Schizoanalysis does not pertain to elements or 

aggregates, nor to subjects, relations, or structures. It pertains only to linea-
ments 
running through groups as well as individuals. Schizoanalysis, as the 

analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political, whether it is a 

question of an individual, group, or society. For politics precedes being. 

Practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their rela-

tions, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines; it confronts the 

same dangers and the same variations as the emplacement does. 

Schizoanalysis is like the art of the new. Or rather, there is no problem of 

application: the lines it brings out could equally be the lines of a life, a work

 

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of literature or art, or a society, depending on which system of coordinates 

is chosen.

 

Line of molar or rigid segmentarity, line of molecular or supple seg-

mentation, line of flight—many problems arise. The first concerns the 
particular character of each line. It might be thought that rigid segments 

are socially determined, predetermined, overcoded by the State; there 

may be a tendency to construe supple segmentarity as an interior activity, 

something imaginary or phantasmic. As for the line of flight, would it not 

be entirely personal, the way in which an individual escapes on his or her 

own account, escapes "responsibilities," escapes the world, takes refuge 

in the desert, or else in art... ? False impression. Supple segmentarity has 

nothing to do with the imaginary, and micropolitics is no less extensive 

or real than macropolitics. Politics on the grand scale can never 

administer its molar segments without also dealing with the micro-

injections or infiltrations that work in its favor or present an obstacle to it; 

indeed, the larger the molar aggregates, the greater the molecularization 

of the agencies they put into play. Lines of flight, for their part, never con-

sist in running away from the world but rather in causing runoffs, as when 

you drill a hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak from 

all directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to 

seal the lines of flight. There is nothing imaginary, nothing symbolic, 

about a line of flight. There is nothing more active than a line of flight, 

among animals or humans.

13

 Even History is forced to take that route 

rather than proceeding by "signifying breaks." What is escaping in a soci-

ety at a given moment? It is on lines of flight that new weapons are 

invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the State. "I may be run-

ning, but I'm looking for a gun as I go" (George Jackson). It was along lines 

of flight that the nomads swept away everything in their path and found 

new weapons, leaving the Pharaoh thunderstruck. It is possible for a sin-

gle group, or a single individual even, to exhibit all the lines we have been 

discussing simultaneously. But it is most frequently the case that a single 

group or individual functions as a line of flight; that group or individual 

creates the line rather than following it, is itself the living weapon it forges 

rather than stealing one. Lines of flight are realities; they are very danger-

ous for societies, although they can get by without them, and sometimes 

manage to keep them to a minimum.

 

The second problem concerns the respective importance of the lines. 

You can begin with the rigid segmentarity, it's the easiest, it's pregiven; 

and then you can look at how and to what extent it is crosscut by a supple 

segmentarity, a kind of rhizome surrounding its roots. Then you can look 

at how the line of flight enters in. And alliances and battles. But it is also 

possible to begin with the line of flight: perhaps this is the primary line,

 

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with its absolute deterritorialization. It is clear that the line of flight does 
not come afterward; 
it is there from the beginning, even if it awaits its 

hour, and waits for the others to explode. Supple segmentarity, then, is 

only a kind of compromise operating by relative deterritorializations and 

permitting reterritorializations that cause blockages and reversions to the 

rigid line. It is odd how supple segmentarity is caught between the two 

other lines, ready to tip to one side or the other; such is its ambiguity. It is 

also necessary to look at the various combinations: it is quite possible that 

one group or individual's line of flight may not work to benefit that of 

another group or individual; it may on the contrary block it, plug it, throw 

it even deeper into rigid segmentarity. It can happen in love that one per-

son's creative line is the other's imprisonment. The composition of the 

lines, of one line with another, is a problem, even of two lines of the same 

type. There is no assurance that two lines of flight will prove compatible, 

compossible. There is no assurance that the body without organs will be 

easy to compose. There is no assurance that a love, or a political ap-

proach, will withstand it.

 

Third problem: there is a mutual immanence of the lines. And it is not 

easy to sort them out. No one of them is transcendent, each is at work 

within the others. Immanence everywhere. Lines of flight are immanent to 

the social field. Supple segmentarity continually dismantles the concre-

tions of rigid segmentarity, but everything that it dismantles it reassembles 

on its own level: micro-Oedipuses, microformations of power, 

microfascisms. The line of flight blasts the two segmentary series apart; but 

it is capable of the worst, of bouncing off the wall, falling into a black hole, 

taking the path of greatest regression, and in its vagaries reconstructing the 

most rigid of segments. Have you sown your wild oats? That is worse than 

not escaping at all: See Lawrence's reproach to Melville.

14

 Between the 

matter of a dirty little secret in rigid segmentarity, the empty form of 

"What happened?" in supple segmentarity, and clandestinity of what can 

no longer happen on the line of flight, how can we fail to see the upheavals 

caused by a monster force, the Secret, threatening to bring everything tum-

bling down? Between the Couple of the first kind of segmentarity, the Dou-

ble of the second, and the Clandestine of the line of flight, there are so many 

possible mixtures and passages.

 

There is one last problem, the most anguishing one, concerning the dan-

gers specific to each line. There is not much to say about the danger con-

fronting the first, for the chances are slim that its rigidification will fail. 

There is not much to say about the ambiguity of the second. But why is the 

line of flight, even aside from the danger it runs of reverting to one of the 

other two lines, imbued with such singular despair in spite of its message of 

joy, as if at the very moment things are coming to a resolution its undertak-

 

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ing were threatened by something reaching down to its core, by a death, a 

demolition? Shestov said of Chekhov, a great creator of novellas: "There 

can be practically no doubt that Chekhov exerted himself, and something 

broke inside him. And the overstrain came not from hard and heavy labor; 

no mighty overpowering exploit broke him: he stumbled and fell, he 

slipped. . . . The old Chekhov of gaiety and mirth is no more. . . . Instead, a 

morose and overshadowed man, a 'criminal.' "

15

  What happened? Once 

again, this is the question facing all of Chekhov's characters. Is it not possi-

ble to exert oneself, and even break something, without falling into a black 

hole of bitterness and sand? But did Chekhov really fall? Is that not to 

judge him entirely from the outside? Was Chekhov not correct in saying 

that however grim his characters are, he still carries "a hundred pounds of 

love"? Of course, nothing is easy on the lines that compose us, and that con-

stitute the essence of the Novella (la Nouvelle), and sometimes of Good 

News (la Bonne Nouvelle).

 

What are your couples, your doubles, your clandestines, and what are 

their mixes? When one person says to another, love the taste of whiskey on 

my lips like I love the gleam of madness in your eyes, what lines are they in 

the process of composing, or, on the contrary, making incompossible? 

Fitzgerald: "Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relations will tell you 

in good faith that it was my drinking that drove Zelda mad, and the other 

half would assure you that it was her madness that drove me to drink. Nei-

ther of these judgments means much of anything. These two groups of 

friends and relations would be unanimous in saying that each of us would 

have been much better off without the other. The irony is that we have 

never been more in love with each other in all of our lives. She loves the 

alcohol on my lips. I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations." "In the 

end, nothing really had much importance. We destroyed ourselves. But in 

all honesty, I never thought we destroyed each other." Beautiful texts. All 

of the lines are there: the lines of family and friends, of all those who 

speak, explain, and psychoanalyze, assigning rights and wrongs, of the 

whole binary machine of the Couple, united or divided, in rigid 

seg-mentarity (50 percent). Then there is the line of supple segmentation, 

from which the alcoholic and the madwoman extract, as from a kiss on the 

lips and eyes, the multiplication of a double at the limit of what they can 

endure in their state and with the tacit understandings serving them as 

internal messages. Finally, there is a line of flight, all the more shared now 

that they are separated, or vice versa, each of them the clandestine of the 

other, a double all the more successful now that nothing has importance 

any longer, now that everything can begin anew, since they have been 

destroyed but not by each other. Nothing will enter memory, everything 

was on the lines, between the lines, in the AND that made one and the

 

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other imperceptible, without disjunction or conjunction but only a line of 

flight forever in the process of being drawn, toward a new acceptance, the 

opposite of renunciation or resignation—a new happiness?

 

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9. 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity

 

 

Segmentarities (Overview of the Types)

 

We are segmented from all around and in every direction. The human being 

is a segmentary animal. Segmentarity is inherent to all the strata composing 

us. Dwelling, getting around, working, playing: life is spatially and socially 

segmented. The house is segmented according to its rooms' assigned pur-

poses; streets, according to the order of the city; the factory, according to the 

nature of the work and operations performed in it. We are segmented in a 
binary fashion, following the great major dualist oppositions: social classes, 

but also men-women, adults-children, and so on. We are segmented in a cir-

 

208

 

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cular fashion, in ever larger circles, ever wider disks or coronas, like Joyce's 

"letter": my affairs, my neighborhood's affairs, my city's, my country's, the 

world's .. . We are segmented in a linear fashion, along a straight line or a 

number of straight lines, of which each segment represents an episode or 

"proceeding": as soon as we finish one proceeding we begin another, forever 

proceduring or procedured, in the family, in school, in the army, on the job. 

School tells us, "You're not at home anymore"; the army tells us, "You're not 

in school anymore" . .. Sometimes the various segments belong to different 

individuals or groups, and sometimes the same individual or group passes 

from one segment to another. But these figures of segmentarity, the binary, 

circular, and linear, are bound up with one another, even cross over into each 

other, changing according to the point of view. This is already evident among 

"savage" peoples: Lizot shows how the communal House is organized in cir-

cular fashion, going from interior to exterior in a series of coronas within 

which certain types of localizable activities take place (worship and ceremo-

nies, followed by exchange of goods, followed by family life, followed by 

trash and excrement); at the same time "each of these coronas is itself 

trans-versally divided, each segment devolves upon a particular lineage and is 

subdivided among different kinship groups."

1

 In a more general context, 

Levi-Strauss shows that the dualist organization of primitive peoples has a 

circular form, and also takes a linear form encompassing "any number of 

groups" (at least three).

2

 

Why return to the primitives, when it is a question of our own life? The 

fact is that the notion of segmentarity was constructed by ethnologists to 

account for so-called primitive societies, which have no fixed, central State 

apparatus and no global power mechanisms or specialized political institu-

tions. In these societies, the social segments have a certain leeway, between 

the two extreme poles of fusion and scission, depending on the task and the 

situation; there is also considerable communicability between heterogene-

ous elements, so that one segment can fit with another in a number of 

different ways; and they have a local construction excluding the prior 

determination of a base domain (economic, political, juridical, artistic); 

they have extrinsic and situational properties, or relations irreducible to 

the intrinsic properties of a structure; activity is continuous, so segmen-

tarity is not grasped as something separate from a 

segmentation-in-progress operating by outgrowths, detachments, and 

mergings. Primitive segmentarity is characterized by a polyvocal code 

based on lineages and their varying situations and relations, and an 

itinerant  territoriality  based on local, overlapping divisions. Codes and 

territories, clan lineages and tribal territorialities, form a fabric of 

relatively supple segmentarity.

3

 

However, it seems to us difficult to maintain that State societies, even 

our modern States, are any less segmentary. The classical opposition

 

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between segmentarity and centralization hardly seems relevant.

4

 Not only 

does the State exercise power over the segments it sustains or permits to 

survive, but it possesses, and imposes, its own segmentarity. Perhaps the 

opposition sociologists establish between the segmentary and the central is 

biological deep down: the ringed worm, and the central nervous system. 

But the central brain itself is a worm, even more segmented than the others, 

in spite of and including all of its vicarious actions. There is no opposition 

between the central and the segmentary. The modern political system is a 

global whole, unified and unifying, but is so because it implies a constella-

tion of juxtaposed, imbricated, ordered subsystems; the analysis of deci-

sion making brings to light all kinds of compartmentalizations and partial 

processes that interconnect, but not without gaps and displacements. 

Technocracy operates by the segmentary division of labor (this applies to 

the international division of labor as well). Bureaucracy exists only in com-

partmentalized offices and functions only by "goal displacements" and the 

corresponding "dysfunctions." Hierarchy is not simply pyramidal; the 

boss's office is as much at the end of the hall as on top of the tower. In short, 

we would say that modern life has not done away with segmentarity but has 

on the contrary made it exceptionally rigid.

 

Instead of setting up an opposition between the segmentary and the cen-

tralized, we should make a distinction between two types of segmentarity, 

one "primitive" and supple, the other "modern" and rigid. This distinction 

reframes each of the figures previously discussed.

 

1.  Binary oppositions (men/women, those on top/those on the bottom, 

etc.) are very strong in primitive societies, but seem to be the result of 

machines and assemblages that are not in themselves binary. The social 

binarity between men and women in a group applies rules according to 

which both sexes must take their respective spouses from different groups 

(which is why there are at least three groups). Thus Levi-Strauss can dem-

onstrate that dualist organization never stands on its own in this kind of 

society. On the contrary, it is a particularity of modern societies, or rather 

State societies, to bring into their own duality machines that function as 

such, and proceed simultaneously by biunivocal relationships and succes-

sively by binarized choices. Classes and sexes come in twos, and phenom-

ena of tripartition result from a transposition of the dual, not the reverse. 

We have already encountered this, notably in the case of the Face machine, 

which differs in this respect from primitive head machines. It seems that 

modern societies elevated dual segmentarity to the level of a self-sufficient 

organization. The question, therefore, is not whether the status of women, 

or those on the bottom, is better or worse, but the type of organization from 

which that status results. 

2.  Similarly, we may note that in primitive societies circular segmen- 

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tarity does not necessarily imply that the circles are concentric, or have the 

same center. In a supple regime, centers already act as so many knots, eyes, 

or black holes; but they do not all resonate together, they do not fall on the 

same point, they do not converge in the same black hole. There is a multi-

plicity of animist eyes, each of which is assigned, for example, a particular 

animal spirit (snake-spirit, woodpecker-spirit, cayman-spirit ...). Each 

black hole is occupied by a different animal eye. Doubtless, we see opera-

tions of rigidification and centralization take shape here and there: all of 

the centers must collect on a single circle, which itself has a single center. 

The shaman draws lines between all the points or spirits, outlines a constel-

lation, a radiating set of roots tied to a central tree. This is the birth of a cen-

tralized power with an arborescent system to discipline the outgrowths of 

the primitive rhizome.

5

 Here, the tree simultaneously plays the role of a 

principle of dichotomy or binarity, and an axis of rotation. But the power of 

the shaman is still entirely localized, strictly dependent upon a particular 

segment, contingent upon drugs, and each point continues to emit inde-

pendent sequences. The same cannot be said of modern societies, or even 

of States. Of course, the centralized is not opposed to the segmentary, and 

the circles remain distinct. But they become concentric, definitively 

arborified. The segmentarity becomes rigid, to the extent that all centers 

resonate in, and all black holes fall on, a single point of accumulation that is 

like a point of intersection somewhere behind the eyes. The face of the 

father, teacher, colonel, boss, enter into redundancy, refer back to a center 

of signifiance that moves across the various circles and passes back over all 

of the segments. The supple microheads with animal facializations are 

replaced by a macroface whose center is everywhere and circumference 

nowhere. There are no longer eyes in the sky, or in becomings-animal and 

-vegetable, but a central computing eye scanning all of the radii. The cen-

tral State is constituted not by the abolition of circular segmentarity but by 

a concentricity of distinct circles, or the organization of a resonance among 

centers. There are already just as many power centers in primitive societies; 
or, if one prefers, there are still just as many in State societies. 
The latter, 

however, behave as apparatuses of resonance; they organize resonance, 

whereas the former inhibit it.

6

 

3. Finally, in the case of linear segmentarity, we would say that each seg-

ment is underscored, rectified, and homogenized in its own right, but also 

in relation to the others. Not only does each have its own unit of measure, 

but there is an equivalence and translatability between units. The central 

eye has as its correlate a space through which it moves, but it itself remains 

invariant in relation to its movements. With the Greek city-state and 

Cleisthenes' reform, a homogeneous and isotopic space appears that 

overcodes the lineal segments, at the same time as distinct focal points

 

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begin to resonate in a center acting as their common denominator.

7

 Paul 

Virilio shows that after the Greek city-state, the Roman Empire imposes a 

geometrical or linear reason of State including a general outline of camps 

and fortifications, a universal art of "marking boundaries by lines," a 

laying-out of territories, a substitution of space for places and territoriali-

ties, and a transformation of the world into the city; in short, an increas-

ingly rigid segmentarity.

8

 The segments, once underscored or overcoded, 

seem to lose their ability to bud, they seem to lose their dynamic relation to 

segmentations-in-progress, or in the act of coming together or coming 

apart. If there exists a primitive "geometry" (a protogeometry), it is an 

operative geometry in which figures are never separable from the affecta-

tions befalling them, the lines of their becoming, the segments of their seg-

mentation: there is "roundness," but no circle, "alignments," but no 

straight line, etc. On the contrary, State geometry, or rather the bond 

between the State and geometry, manifests itself in the primacy of the 

theorem-element, which substitutes fixed or ideal essences for supple mor-

phological formations, properties for affects, predetermined segments for 

segmentations-in-progress. Geometry and arithmetic take on the power of 

the scalpel. Private property implies a space that has been overcoded and 

gridded by surveying. Not only does each line have its segments, but the 

segments of one line correspond to those of another; for example, the wage 

regime establishes a correspondence between monetary segments, produc-

tion segments, and consumable-goods segments.

 

We may summarize the principal differences between rigid segmentarity 

and supple segmentarity. In the rigid mode, binary segmentarity stands on 

its own and is governed by great machines of direct binarization, whereas in 

the other mode, binarities result from "multiplicities of dimensions." Sec-

ond, circular segmentarity tends to become concentric, in other words, 

causes all of its focal points to coincide in a single center that is in constant 

movement but remains invariant through its movements, and is part of a 

machine of resonance. Finally, linear segmentarity feeds into a machine of 

overcoding that constitutes more geometrico homogeneous space and 

extracts segments that are determinate as to their substance, form, and rela-

tions. It will be noted that this rigid segmentarity is always expressed by the 

Tree. The Tree is the knot of arborescence or principle of dichotomy; it is the 

axis of'rotation guaranteeing concentricity; it is the structure or network 

gridding the possible. This opposition between arborified and rhizomatic 

segmentarity is not just meant to indicate two states of a single process, but 

also to isolate two different processes. For primitive societies operate essen-

tially by codes and territorialities. It is in fact the distinction between these 

two elements, the tribal system of territories and the clan system of lineages, 

that prevents resonance.

9

 Modern, or State, societies, on the other hand,

 

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have replaced the declining codes with a univocal overcoding, and the lost 

territories with a specific reterritorialization (which takes place in an 

overcoded geometrical space). Segmentarity is always the result of an 

abstract machine, but different abstract machines operate in the rigid and 

the supple.

 

It is not enough, therefore, to oppose the centralized to the segmentary. 

Nor is it enough to oppose two kinds of segmentarity, one supple and prim-

itive, the other modern and rigidified. There is indeed a distinction 

between the two, but they are inseparable, they overlap, they are entangled. 

Primitive societies have nuclei of rigidity or arborification that as much 

anticipate the State as ward it off. Conversely, our societies are still suf-

fused by a supple fabric without which their rigid segments would not hold. 

Supple segmentarity cannot be restricted to primitive peoples. It is not the 

vestige of the savage within us but a perfectly contemporary function, 

inseparable from the other. Every society, and every individual, are thus 

plied by both segmentarities simultaneously: one molar, the other molecu-
lar. 
If they are distinct, it is because they do not have the same terms or the 

same relations or the same nature or even the same type of multiplicity. If 

they are inseparable, it is because they coexist and cross over into each 

other. The configurations differ, for example, between the primitives and 

us, but the two segmentarities are always in presupposition. In short, every-

thing is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a 
micropolitics. Take aggregates of the perception or feeling type: their molar 

organization, their rigid segmentarity, does not preclude the existence of 

an entire world of unconscious micropercepts, unconscious affects, fine 

segmentations that grasp or experience different things, are distributed 

and operate differently. There is a micropolitics of perception, affection, 

conversation, and so forth. If we consider the great binary aggregates, such 

as the sexes or classes, it is evident that they also cross over into molecular 

assemblages of a different nature, and that there is a double reciprocal 

dependency between them. For the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molec-

ular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and 

the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: 

a thousand tiny sexes. And social classes themselves imply "masses" that 

do not have the same kind of movement, distribution, or objectives and do 

not wage the same kind of struggle. Attempts to distinguish mass from class 

effectively tend toward this limit: the notion of mass is a molecular notion 

operating according to a type of segmentation irreducible to the molar 

segmentarity of class. Yet classes are indeed fashioned from masses; they 

crystallize them. And masses are constantly flowing or leaking from 

classes. Their reciprocal presupposition, however, does not preclude a dif-

 

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ference in viewpoint, nature, scale, and function (understood in this way, 

the notion of mass has entirely different connotations than Canetti's 

"crowd").

 

It is not sufficient to define bureaucracy by a rigid segmentarity with 

compartmentalization of contiguous offices, an office manager in each 

segment, and the corresponding centralization at the end of the hall or on 

top of the tower. For at the same time there is a whole bureaucratic segmen-

tation, a suppleness of and communication between offices, a bureaucratic 

perversion, a permanent inventiveness or creativity practiced even against 

administrative regulations. If Kafka is the greatest theorist of bureaucracy, 

it is because he shows how, at a certain level (but which one? it is not 

localizable), the barriers between offices cease to be "a definite dividing 

line" and are immersed in a molecular medium (milieu)  that dissolves 

them and simultaneously makes the office manager proliferate into 

microfigures impossible to recognize or identify, discernible only when 

they are centralizable: another regime, coexistent with the separation and 

totalization of the rigid segments.

I0

 We would even say that fascism implies 

a molecular regime that is distinct both from molar segments and their cen-

tralization. Doubtless, fascism invented the concept of the totalitarian 

State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devis-

ing: there are totalitarian States, of the Stalinist or military dictatorship 

type, that are not fascist. The concept of the totalitarian State applies only 

at the macropohtical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of 

totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a prolifera-

tion of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, 
before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural 

fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's 

fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, 

family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole 

that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonat-

ing in a great, generalized central black hole.

1

' There is fascism when a war 

machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National 

Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it 

unequaled ability to act upon the "masses." Daniel Guerin is correct to say 

that if Hitler took power, rather then taking over the German State admin-

istration, it was because from the beginning he had at his disposal 

microorganizations giving him "an unequaled, irreplaceable ability to 

penetrate every cell of society," in other words, a molecular and supple 

segmentarity, flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell. Conversely, if 

capitalism came to consider the fascist experience as catastrophic, if it pre-

ferred to ally itself with Stalinist totalitarianism, which from its point of 

view was much more sensible and manageable, it was because the

 

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segmentarity and centralization of the latter was more classical and less 

fluid. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical 

power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitar-

ian organism. American film has often depicted these molecular focal 

points; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighborhood, vehicle fascisms 

spare no one. Only microfascism provides an answer to the global ques-

tion: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own 

repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do 

they "want" to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they 

tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex 

assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from 

microforma-tions already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, 

expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated 

instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered 

setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes 

molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination. 

Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It's too 

easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist 

inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with 

molecules both personal and collective.

 

Four errors concerning this molecular and supple segmentarity are to be 

avoided. The first is axiological and consists in believing that a little sup-

pleness is enough to make things "better." But microfascisms are what 

make fascism so dangerous, and fine segmentations are as harmful as the 

most rigid of segments. The second is psychological, as if the molecular 

were in the realm of the imagination and applied only to the individual and 

interindividual. But there is just as much social-Real on one line as on the 

other. Third, the two forms are not simply distinguished by size, as a small 

form and a large form; although it is true that the molecular works in detail 

and operates in small groups, this does not mean that it is any less coexten-

sive with the entire social field than molar organization. Finally, the quali-

tative difference between the two lines does not preclude their boosting or 

cutting into each other; there is always a proportional relation between the 

two, directly or inversely proportional.

 

In the first case, the stronger the molar organization is, the more it 

induces a molecularization of its own elements, relations, and elementary 

apparatuses. When the machine becomes planetary or cosmic, there is an 

increasing tendency for assemblages to miniaturize, to become 

micro-assemblages. Following Andre Gorz's formula, the only remaining 

element of work left under world capitalism is the molecular, or 

molecularized, individual, in other words, the "mass" individual. The 

administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a 

whole micro-

 

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management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point 

that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of soci-

ety by and for a micropolitics of insecurity.

12

 However, the second case is 

even more important: molecular movements do not complement but 

rather thwart and break through the great worldwide organization. That is 

what French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing was saying in his military 

and political geography lesson: the more balanced things are between East 

and West, in an overcoding and overarmed dualist machine, the more 

"destabilized" they become along the other, North-South, line. There is 

always a Palestinian or Basque or Corsican to bring about a "regional 

destabilization of security."

13

 The two great molar aggregates of the East 

and West are perpetually being undermined by a molecular segmentation 

causing a zigzag crack, making it difficult for them to keep their own seg-

ments in line. It is as if a line of flight, perhaps only a tiny trickle to begin 

with, leaked between the segments, escaping their centralization, eluding 

their totalization. The profound movements stirring in a society present 

themselves in this fashion, even if they are necessarily "represented" as a 

confrontation between molar segments. It is wrongly said (in Marxism in 

particular) that a society is defined by its contradictions. That is true only 

on the larger scale of things. From the viewpoint of micropolitics, a society 

is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular. There is always some-

thing that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the reso-

nance apparatus, and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed to 

a "change in values," the youth, women, the mad, etc. May 1968 in France 

was molecular, making what led up to it all the more imperceptible from 

the viewpoint of macropolitics. It happens that people who are very lim-

ited in outlook or are very old grasp the event better than the most 

advanced politicians, or politicians who consider themselves advanced 

from the viewpoint of organization. As Gabriel Tarde said, what one needs 

to know is which peasants, in which areas of the south of France, stopped 

greeting the local landowners. A very old, outdated landowner can in this 

case judge things better than a modernist. It was the same with May '68: 

those who evaluated things in macropohtical terms understood nothing of 

the event because something unaccountable was escaping. The politicians, 

the parties, the unions, many leftists, were utterly vexed; they kept repeat-

ing over and over again that "conditions" were not ripe. It was as though 

they had been temporarily deprived of the entire dualism machine that 

made them valid spokespeople. Bizarrely, de Gaulle, and even Pompidou, 

understood much more than the others. A molecular flow was escaping, 

minuscule at first, then swelling, without, however, ceasing to be 

unassignable. The reverse, however, is also true: molecular escapes and 

movements would be nothing if they did not return to the molar orga-

 

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nizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes, 

classes, and parties.

 

The issue is that the molar and the molecular are distinguished not by 

size, scale, or dimension but by the nature of the system of reference envi-

sioned. Perhaps, then, the words "line" and "segment" should be reserved 

for molar organization, and other, more suitable, words should be sought 

for molecular composition. And in fact, whenever we can identify a 

well-defined segmented line, we notice that it continues in another form, 

as a quantum flow. And in every instance, we can locate a "power center" at 

the border between the two, defined not by an absolute exercise of power 

within its domain but by the relative adaptations and conversions it effects 

between the line and the flow. Take a monetary flow with segments. These 

segments can be defined from several points of view, for example, from the 

viewpoint of a corporate budget (real wages, net profit, management sala-

ries, interest on assets, reserves, investments, etc.). Now this line of 

payment-money is linked to another aspect, namely, the flow of 

financing-money, which has, not segments, but rather poles, singularities, 

and quanta (the poles of the flow are the creation of money and its 

destruction; the singularities are nominal liquid assets; the quanta are 

inflation, deflation, stagflation, etc.). This has led some to speak of a 

"mutant, convulsive, creative and circulatory flow" tied to desire and 

always subjacent to the solid line and its segments determining interest 

rates and supply and demand.

14 

In a balance of payment, we again 

encounter a binary segmentarity that distinguishes, for example, 

so-called autonomous operations from so-called compensatory operations. 

But movements of capital do not allow themselves to be segmented in this 

way; because they are "the most thoroughly broken down, according to 

their nature, duration, and the personality of the creditor or debtor," one "no 

longer has any idea where to draw the line when dealing with these 

flows."

15

 Yet there is always a correlation between the two aspects since 

linearization and segmentation are where flows run dry, but are also their 

point of departure for a new creation. When we talk about banking power, 

concentrated most notably in the central banks, it is indeed a question of 

the relative power to regulate "as much as" possible the communication, 

conversion, and coadaptation of the two parts of the circuit. That is why 

power centers are defined much more by what escapes them or by their 

impotence than by their zone of power. In short, the molecular, or 

microeconomics, micropolitics, is defined not by the smallness of its 

elements but by the nature of its "mass"—the quantum flow as opposed to 

the molar segmented line.

16

 The task of making the segments correspond to 

the quanta, of adjusting the segments to the quanta, implies hit-and-miss 

changes in rhythm and mode rather than any omnipotence; and something 

always escapes.

 

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We could take other examples, such as the power of the Church. Church 

power has always been associated with a certain administration of sin 

possessing a strong segmentarity (the seven deadly sins), units of measure 

(how many times?), and rules of equivalence and atonement (confession, 

penance . . .). But there is also what might be called the molecular flow of 

sinfulness, something quite different yet complementary: it hugs close to 

the linear zone, as though negotiated through it, but itself has only poles 

(original sin-redemption or grace) and quanta ("that sin which is the 

default of consciousness of sin"; the sin of having a consciousness of sin; 

the sin of the consequence of having a consciousness of sin).

17

 The same 

could be said of a flow of criminality, in contrast to the molar line of a legal 

code and its divisions. Or to take another example, discussions of military 

power, or the power of the army, consider a segmentable line broken down 

into types of war corresponding exactly to the States waging war and the 

political goals those States assign themselves (from "limited" war to "total" 

war). But following Clausewitz's intuition, the war machine is very differ-

ent; it is a flow of absolute war stretching between an offensive and a defen-

sive pole, and is marked only by quanta (psychic and material forces that 

are like the nominal liquid assets of war). We may say of the pure flow that it 

is abstract yet real; ideal yet effective; absolute yet "differentiated." It is 

true that the flow and its quanta can be grasped only by virtue of indexes on 

the segmented line, but conversely, that line and those indexes exist only by 

virtue of the flow suffusing them. In every case, it is evident that the seg-

mented line (macropolitics) is immersed in and prolonged by quantum 

flows (micropolitics) that continually reshuffle and stir up its segments.

 

A: flow and poles 

s***/

 

a: quanta 

f

 

b: line and segments 

I

 

B: power center 

V

 

(all of which constitutes a 

\^

 

cycle or period) 

V

s

s^^

 

Bb      i

3

        i

t

     

i

t

      Bi 

n

~

 

In homage to Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904): his long-forgotton work has 

assumed new relevance with the influence of American sociology, in par-

ticular microsociology. It had been quashed by Durkheim and his school 

(in polemics similar to and as harsh as Cuvier's against Geoffroy 

Saint-Hilaire). Durkheim's preferred objects of study were the great 

collective representations, which are generally binary, resonant, and 

overcoded. Tarde countered that collective representations presuppose 

exactly what needs explaining, namely, "the similarity of millions of 

people." That is why Tarde was interested instead in the world of detail, 

or of the infini-

 

 

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MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 219

 

tesimal: the little imitations, oppositions, and  inventions  constituting an 

entire realm of subrepresentative matter. Tarde's best work was his analy-

ses of a minuscule bureaucratic innovation, or a linguistic innovation, etc. 

The Durkheimians answered that what Tarde did was psychology or 

inter-psychology, not sociology. But that is true only in appearance, as a 

first approximation: a microimitation does seem to occur between two 

individuals. But at the same time, and at a deeper level, it has to do not 

with an individual but with a flow or a wave. Imitation is the propagation of 
a flow; opposition is binarization, the making binary of flows; invention is a 
conjugation or connection of different flows. 
What, according to Tarde, is a 

flow? It is belief or desire (the two aspects of every assemblage); a flow is 

always of belief and of desire. Beliefs and desires are the basis of every 

society, because they are flows and as such are "quantifiable"; they are 

veritable social Quantities, whereas sensations are qualitative and 

representations are simple resultants.

18

 Infinitesimal imitation, opposition, 

and invention are therefore like flow quanta marking a propagation, 

binarization, or conjugation of beliefs and desires. Hence the importance 

of statistics, providing it concerns itself with the cutting edges and not 

only with the "stationary" zone of representations. For in the end, the 

difference is not at all between the social and the individual (or 

interindividual), but between the molar realm of representations, individual 

or collective, and the molecular realm of beliefs and desires in which the 

distinction between the social and the individual loses all meaning since 

flows are neither attributable to individuals nor overcodable by collective 

signifiers. Representations already define large-scale aggregates, or 

determine segments on a line; beliefs and desires, on the other hand, are 

flows marked by quanta, flows that are created, exhausted, or 

transformed, added to one another, subtracted or combined. Tarde 

invented microsociology and took it to its full breadth and scope, 

denouncing in advance the misinterpretations to which it would later fall 

victim.

 

This is how you tell the difference between the segmented line and the 

quantum flow. A mutant flow always implies something tending to elude or 

escape the codes; quanta are precisely signs or degrees of 

deterrito-rialization in the decoded flow. The rigid line, on the other 

hand, implies an overcoding that substitutes itself for the faltering codes; its 

segments are like reterritorializations on the overcoding or overcoded line. 

Let us return to the case of original sin: it is the very act of a flow marking 

a decoding in relation to creation (with just one last island preserved for 

the Virgin), and a deterritorialization in relation to the land of Adam; but it 

simultaneously performs an overcoding by binary organizations and 

resonance (Powers, Church, empires, rich-poor, men-women, etc.) and 

complementary reterritorializations (on the land of Cain, on work, on 

reproduction, on

 

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money.. .)• Now the two systems of reference are in inverse relation to 

each other, in the sense that the first eludes the second, or the second arrests 

the first, prevents it from flowing further; but at the same time, they are 

strictly complementary and coexistent, because one exists only as a func-

tion of the other; yet they are different and in direct relation to each 

other, although corresponding term by term, because the second only 

effectively arrests the first on a "plane" that is not the plane specific to the 

first, while the momentum of the first continues on its own plane.

 

A social field is always animated by all kinds of movements of decoding 

and deterritorialization affecting "masses" and operating at different 

speeds and paces. These are not contradictions but escapes. At this level, 

everything is a question of mass. For example, from the tenth to the four-

teenth centuries we see an acceleration of factors of decoding and deterri-

torialization: the masses of the last invaders swooping down from north, 

east, and south; military masses turned into pillaging bands; ecclesiastical 

masses confronted with infidels and heretics, and adopting increasingly 

deterritorialized objectives; peasant masses leaving the seigneurial do-

mains; seigneurial masses forced to find means of exploitation less terri-

torial than serfdom; urban masses breaking away from the backcountry 

and finding increasingly less territorialized social arrangements in the cit-

ies; women's masses detaching themselves from the old passional and con-

jugal code; monetary masses that cease to be a hoard object and inject 

themselves into great commercial circuits.

19

 We may cite the Crusades as 

effecting a connection of flows, each boosting and accelerating the others 

(even the flow of femininity in the "faraway Princess," even the flow of chil-

dren in the Crusades of the thirteenth century). But at the same time, and 

inseparably, there occur overcodings and reterritorializations. The Cru-

sades were overcoded by the pope and assigned territorial objectives. The 

Holy Land, the Peace of God, a new type of abbey, new figures of money, 

new modes of exploitation of the peasant through leasehold and the wage 

system (or revivals of slavery), urban reterritorializations, etc., form a 

complex system. At this point, we must introduce a distinction between the 

two notions of connection and conjugation of flows. "Connection" indi-

cates the way in which decoded and deterritorialized flows boost one 

another, accelerate their shared escape, and augment or stoke their quanta; 

the "conjugation" of these same flows, on the other hand, indicates their 

relative stoppage, like a point of accumulation that plugs or seals the lines 

of flight, performs a general reterritorialization, and brings the flows under 

the dominance of a single flow capable of overcoding them. But it is pre-

cisely the most deterritorialized flow, under the first aspect, that always 

brings about the accumulation or conjunction of the processes, determines 

the overcoding, and serves as the basis for reterritorialization under the

 

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MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 221

 

second aspect (we have already encountered a theorem according to which 

it is always on the most deterritorialized element that reterritorialization 

takes place). For example, the merchant bourgeoisie of the cities conju-

gated or capitalized a domain of knowledge, a technology, assemblages and 

circuits into whose dependency the nobility, Church, artisans, and even 

peasants would enter. It is precisely because the bourgeoisie was a cutting 

edge of deterritorialization, a veritable particle accelerator, that it also per-

formed an overall reterritorialization.

 

The task of the historian is to designate the "period" of coexistence or 

simultaneity of these two movements (decoding-deterritorialization and 

overcoding-reterritorialization). For the duration of this period, one distin-

guishes between the molecular aspect and the molar aspect: on the one hand, 
masses or flows, with their mutations, quanta of deterritorialization, con-

nections, and accelerations; on the other hand, classes or segments, with 

their binary organization, resonance, conjunction or accumulation, and line 

of overcoding favoring one line over the others.

20

 The difference between 

macrohistory and microhistory has nothing to do with the length of the 

durations envisioned, long or short, but rather concerns distinct systems of 

reference, depending on whether it is an overcoded segmented line that is 

under consideration or the mutant quantum flow. The rigid system does not 

bring the other system to a halt: the flow continues beneath the line, forever 

mutant, while the line totalizes. Mass and class do not have the same con-

tours or the same dynamic, even though the same group can be assigned both 

signs. The bourgeoisie considered as a mass and as a class... The relations 

of a mass to other masses are not the same as the relations of the "corre-

sponding" class to the other classes. Of course, there are just as many rela-

tions of force, and just as much violence, on one side as the other. The point 

is that the same struggle assumes two very different aspects, in relation to 

which the victories and defeats differ. Mass movements accelerate and feed 

into one another (or dim for a long while, enter long stupors), but jump from 

one class to another, undergo mutation, emanate or emit new quanta that 

then modify class relations, bring their overcoding and reterritorialization 

into question, and run new lines of flight in new directions. Beneath the 

self-reproduction of classes, there is always a variable map of masses. 

Politics operates by macrodecisions and binary choices, binarized interests; 

but the realm of the decidable remains very slim. Political decision making 

necessarily descends into a world of microdeterminations, attractions, 

and desires, which it must sound out or evaluate in a different fashion. 

Beneath linear conceptions and segmentary decisions, an evaluation of 

flows and their quanta. A curious passage by Michelet reproaches Francois I 

for having badly evaluated the flow of emigration bringing to France large 

numbers of people in struggle against the Church: Francois saw it only as 

an influx of

 

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potential soldiers, instead of perceiving a mass molecular flow which France 

could have used to its own advantage by leading a different Reformation 

than the one that occurred.

21

 Problems are always like this. Good or bad, pol-

itics and its judgments are always molar, but it is the molecular and its assess-

ment that makes it or breaks it.

 

Now we are in a better position to draw a map. If we return to a very gen-

eral sense of the word "line," we see that there are not just two kinds of lines 

but three. First, a relatively supple line of interlaced codes and territoriali-

ties; that is why we started with so-called primitive segmentarity, in which 

the social space is constituted by territorial and lineal segmentations. Sec-

ond, a rigid line, which brings about a dualist organization of segments, a 

concentricity of circles in resonance, and generalized overcoding; here, the 

social space implies a State apparatus. This system is different from the 

primitive system precisely because overcoding is not a stronger code, but a 

specific procedure different from that of codes (similarly, 

reterrito-rialization is not an added territory, but takes place in a different 

space than that of territories, namely, overcoded geometrical space). 

Third, one or several lines of flight, marked by quanta and defined by 

decoding and deterritorialization (there is always something like a war 
machine 
functioning on these lines).

 

This way of presenting things still has the disadvantage of making it 

seem as though primitive societies came first. In truth, codes are never sep-

arable from the movement of decoding, nor are territories from the vectors 

of deterritorialization traversing them. And overcoding and 

reterrito-rialization do not come after. It would be more accurate to say that 

there is a space in which the three kinds of closely intermingled lines 

coexist, tribes, empires, and war machines. We could also put it this way: 

lines of flight are primary, or the already-rigid segments are, and supple 

segmentations swing between the two. Take a proposition like the following 

one by the historian Pirenne about barbarian tribes: "The Barbarians did 

not spontaneously hurl themselves upon the Empire. They were pushed 

forward by the flood of the Hunnish advance, which in this way caused the 

whole series of invasions."

22

 On one side, we have the rigid segmentarity 

of the Roman Empire, with its center of resonance and periphery, its 

State, its pax romana, its geometry, its camps, its limes (boundary lines). 

Then, on the horizon, there is an entirely different kind of line, the line of 

the nomads who come in off the steppes, venture a fluid and active escape, 

sow deterritorialization everywhere, launch flows whose quanta heat up and 

are swept along by a Stateless war machine. The migrant barbarians are 

indeed between the two: they come and go, cross and recross frontiers, 

pillage and ransom, but also integrate themselves and reterritorialize. At 

times they

 

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MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY D 223

 

will subside into the empire, assigning themselves a segment of it, becom-

ing mercenaries or confederates, settling down, occupying land or carving 

out their own State (the wise Visigoths). At other times, they will go over to 

the nomads, allying with them, becoming indiscernible (the brilliant 

Ostrogoths). Perhaps because they were constantly being defeated by the 

Huns and Visigoths, the Vandals ("zone-two Goths") drew a line of flight 

that made them as strong as their masters; they were the only band or mass 

to cross the Mediterranean. But they were also the ones who produced the 

most startling reterritorialization: an empire in Africa.

23

 Thus it seems that 

the three lines do not only coexist, but transform themselves into one 

another, cross over into one another. Again, we have taken a summary 

example in which the lines are illustrated by different groups. What we 

have said applies all the more to cases in which all of the lines are in a single 

group, a single individual.

 

In view of this, it would be better to talk about simultaneous states of the 

abstract Machine. There is on the one hand an abstract machine of 
overcoding: 
it defines a rigid segmentarity, a macrosegmentarity, because it 

produces or rather reproduces segments, opposing them two by two, mak-

ing all the centers resonate, and laying out a divisible, homogeneous space 

striated in all directions. This kind of abstract machine is linked to the 

State apparatus. We do not, however, equate it with the State apparatus 

itself. The abstract machine may be defined, for example, more 
geomet-rico,  
or under other conditions by an "axiomatic"; but the State 

apparatus is neither geometry nor axiomatics: it is only the assemblage of 

reterritorialization effectuating the overcoding machine within given limits 

and under given conditions. The most we can say is that the State apparatus 

tends increasingly to identify with the abstract machine it effectuates. 

This is where the notion of the totalitarian State becomes meaningful: a 

State becomes totalitarian when, instead of effectuating, within its own 

limits, the worldwide overcoding machine, it identifies with it, creating the 

conditions for "autarky," producing a reterritorialization by "closed ves-

sel," in the artifice of the void (this is never an ideological operation, but 

rather an economic and political one).

24

 

On the other hand, at the other pole, there is an abstract machine of 

mutation, which operates by decoding and deterritorialization. It is what 

draws the lines of flight: it steers the quantum flows, assures the connec-

tion-creation of flows, and emits new quanta. It itself is in a state of flight, 

and erects war machines on its lines. If it constitutes another pole, it is 

because molar or rigid segments always seal, plug, block the lines of flight, 

whereas this machine is always making them flow, "between" the rigid seg-

ments and in another, submolecular, direction. But between the two poles 

there is also a whole realm of properly molecular negotiation, translation,

 

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and transduction in which at times molar lines are already undermined by 

fissures and cracks, and at other times lines of flight are already drawn 

toward black holes, flow connections are already replaced by limitative 

conjunctions, and quanta emissions are already converted into 

center-points. All of this happens at the same time. It is at the same time 

that lines of flight connect and continue their intensities, whip 

particles-signs out of black holes; and also retreat into the swirl of 

micro-black holes or molecular conjunctions that interrupt them; or 

again, enter overcoded, concentricized, binarized, stable segments 

arrayed around a central black hole.

 

What is a center or focal point of power? Answering this question will 

illustrate the entanglement of the lines. We speak of the power of the army, 

Church, and school, of public and private power ... Power centers obvi-

ously involve rigid segments. Each molar segment has one or more centers. 

It might be objected that the segments themselves presuppose a power cen-

ter, as what distinguishes and unites them, sets them in opposition and 

makes them resonate. But there is no contradiction between the segmen-

tary parts and the centralized apparatus. On the one hand, the most rigid of 

segmentarities does not preclude centralization: this is because the com-

mon central point is not where all the other points melt together, but 

instead acts as a point of resonance on the horizon, behind all the other 

points. The State is not a point taking all the others upon itself, but a reso-

nance chamber for them all. Even when the State is totalitarian, its func-

tion as resonator for distinct centers and segments remains unchanged: the 

only difference is that it takes place under closed-vessel conditions that 

increase its internal reach, or couples "resonance" with a "forced move-

ment." On the other hand, and conversely, the strictest of centralizations 

does not eradicate the distinctiveness of the centers, segments, and circles. 

When the overcoding line is drawn, it assures the prevalence of one seg-

ment, as such, over the other (in the case of binary segmentarity), gives a 

certain center a power of relative resonance over the others (in the case of 

circular segmentarity), and underscores the dominant segment through 

which it itself passes (in the case of linear segmentarity). Thus centraliza-

tion is always hierarchical, but hierarchy is always segmentary.

 

Each power center is also molecular and exercises its power on a 

micrological fabric in which it exists only as diffuse, dispersed, geared 

down, miniaturized, perpetually displaced, acting by fine segmentation, 

working in detail and in the details of detail. Foucault's analysis of "disci-

plines" or micropowers (school, army, factory, hospital, etc.) testifies to 

these "focuses of instability" where groupings and accumulations confront 

each other, but also confront breakaways and escapes, and where inver-

sions occur.

25

 What we have is no longer The Schoolmaster but the monitor,

 

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MICROPOLITICS AND SEGMENTARITY □ 225

 

the best student, the class dunce, the janitor, etc. No longer the general, but 

the junior officers, the noncommissioned officers, the soldier inside me, 

and also the malcontent: all have their own tendencies, poles, conflicts, and 

relations of force. Even the warrant officer and janitor are only invoked for 

explanatory purposes; for they have a molar side and a molecular side, and 

make us realize that the general or the landlord also had both sides all 

along. We would not say that the proper name loses its power when it enters 

these zones of indiscernibility, but that it takes on a new kind of power. To 

talk like Kafka, what we have is no longer the public official Klamm, but 

maybe his secretary Momus, or other molecular Klamms the differences 

between which, and with Klamm, are all the greater for no longer being 

assignable. ("[The officials] don't always stick to the same book, yet it isn't 

the books they change, but their places, and [they] have to squeeze past one 

another when they change places, because there's so little room." "This 

official is rarely very like Klamm, and if he were sitting in his own office at 

his own desk with his name on the door I would have no more doubt at 

all,"

26

 says Barnabas, whose dream would be a uniquely molar 

segmen-tarity, no matter how rigid and horrendous, as the only guarantee 

of certainty and security. But he cannot but notice that the molar 

segments are necessarily immersed in the molecular soup that nourishes 

them and makes their outlines waver.) And every power center has this 

microtexture. The microtextures—not masochism—are what explain how 

the oppressed can take an active role in oppression: the workers of the 

rich nations actively participate in the exploitation of the Third World, 

the arming of dictatorships, and the pollution of the atmosphere.

 

This is not surprising since the texture lies between the line of 

overcoding with rigid segments and the ultimate quantum line. It continu-

ally swings between the two, now channeling the quantum line back into 

the segmented line, now causing flows and quanta to escape from the seg-

mented line. This is the third aspect of power centers, or their limit. For the 

only purpose these centers have is to translate as best they can flow quanta 

into line segments (only segments are totalizable, in one way or another). 

But this is both the principle of their power and the basis of their impo-

tence. Far from being opposites, power and impotence complement and 

reinforce each other in a kind of fascinating satisfaction that is found above 

all in the most mediocre Statesmen, and defines their "glory." For they 

extract glory from their shortsightedness, and power from their impotence, 

because it confirms that there is no choice. The only "great" Statesmen are 

those who connect with flows, like pilot-signs or particles-signs, and who 

emit quanta that get out of the black holes: it is not by chance that these 

men encounter each other only on lines of flight, in the act of drawing 

them, sounding them out, following them, or forging ahead of them, even

 

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though they may make a mistake and take a fall (Moses the Hebrew, 

Genseric the Vandal, Genghis the Mongol, Mao the Chinese . . .). But there 

is no Power regulating the flows themselves. No one dominates the growth 

of the "monetary mass," or money supply. If an image of the master or an 

idea of the State is projected outward to the limits of the universe, as if 

something had domination over flows as well as segments, and in the same 

manner, the result is a fictitious and ridiculous representation. The stock 

exchange gives a better image of flows and their quanta than does the State. 

Capitalists may be the masters of surplus value and its distribution, but 

they do not dominate the flows from which surplus value derives. Rather, 

power centers function at the points where flows are converted into seg-

ments: they are exchangers, converters, oscillators. Not that the segments 

themselves are governed by a decision-making power. We have seen, on the 

contrary, that segments (classes, for example) form at the conjunction of 

masses and deterritorialized flows and that the most deterritorialized flow 

determines the dominant segment; thus the dollar segment dominates cur-

rency, the bourgeoisie dominates capitalism, etc. Segments, then, are 

themselves governed by an abstract machine. But what power centers gov-

ern are the assemblages that effectuate that abstract machine, in other 

words, that continually adapt variations in mass and flow to the segments 

of the rigid line, as a function of a dominant segment and dominated seg-

ments. Much perverse invention can enter into the adaptations.

 

This is the sense in which we would speak, for example, of banking 

power (the World Bank, central banks, credit banks): if the flow of 

financing-money, or credit money, involves the mass of economic transac-

tions, what banks govern is the conversion of the credit money that has 

been  created  into segmentary payment-money that is appropriated,  in 

other words, coinage or State money for the purchase of goods that are 

themselves segmented (the importance of the interest rate in this respect). 

What banks govern is the conversion between the two kinds of money, and 

the conversion of the segments of the second kind into any given good.

27 

The same could be said of every central power. Every central power has 

three aspects or zones: (1) its zone of power, relating to the segments of a 

solid rigid line; (2) its zone of indiscernibility, relating to its diffusion 

throughout a microphysical fabric; (3) its zone of impotence, relatingto the 

flows and quanta it can only convert without being able to control or 

define. It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center 

draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity. Better to 

be a tiny quantum flow than a molar converter, oscillator, or distributor! 

Returning to the example of money, the first zone is represented by the 

public central banks; the second by the "indefinite series of private rela-

tions between banks and borrowers"; the third by the desiring flow of

 

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money, whose quanta are defined by the mass of economic transactions. It 

is true that the same problems are reformulated at the level of these very 

transactions, in relation to other power centers. But the first zone of the 

power center is always defined by the State apparatus, which is the assem-

blage that effectuates the abstract machine of molar overcoding; the sec-

ond is defined in the molecular fabric immersing this assemblage; the third 

by the abstract machine of mutation, flows, and quanta.

 

We cannot say that one of these three lines is bad and another good, by 

nature and necessarily. The study of the dangers of each line is the object of 

pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes not to repre-

sent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and draw lines, mark-

ing their mixtures as well as their distinctions. According to Nietzsche's 

Zarathustra and Castaneda's Indian Don Juan, there are three or even four 

dangers: first, Fear, then Clarity, then Power, and finally the great Disgust, 

the longing to kill and to die, the Passion for abolition.

28

 We can guess what 

fear is. We are always afraid of losing. Our security, the great molar organi-

zation that sustains us, the arborescences we cling to, the binary machines 

that give us a well-defined status, the resonances we enter into, the system 

of overcoding that dominates us—we desire all that. "The values, morals, 

fatherlands, religions and private certitudes our vanity and self-compla-

cency generously grant us are so many abodes the world furnishes for those 

who think on that account that they stand and rest amid stable things; they 

know nothing of the enormous rout they are heading for... in flight from 
flight."

29

 We flee from flight, rigidify our segments, give ourselves over to 

binary logic; the harder they have been to us on one segment, the harder we 

will be on another; we reterritorialize on anything available; the only 

segmentarity we know is molar, at the level of the large-scale aggregates we 

belong to, as well as at the level of the little groups we get into, as well as at 

the level of what goes on in our most intimate and private recesses. Every-

thing is involved: modes of perception, kinds of actions, ways of moving, 

life-styles, semiotic regimes. A man comes home and says, "Is the grub 

ready?", and the wife answers, "What a scowl! Are you in a bad mood?": 

two rigid segments in confrontation. The more rigid the segmentarity, the 

more reassuring it is for us. That is what fear is, and how it makes us retreat 

into the first line.

 

The second danger, Clarity, seems less obvious. Clarity, in effect, con-

cerns the molecular. Once again, everything is involved, even perception, 

even the semiotic regime, but this time on the second line. Castaneda illus-

trates, for example, the existence of a molecular perception to which drugs 

give us access (but so many things can be drugs): we attain a visual and 

sonorous microperception revealing spaces and voids, like holes in the

 

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molar structure. That is precisely what clarity is: the distinctions that 

appear in what used to seem full, the holes in what used to be compact; and 

conversely, where just before we saw end points of clear-cut segments, now 

there are indistinct fringes, encroachments, overlappings, migrations, acts 

of segmentation that no longer coincide with the rigid segmentarity. Every-

thing now appears supple, with holes in fullness, nebulas in forms, and flut-

ter in lines. Everything has the clarity of the microscope. We think we have 

understood everything, and draw conclusions. We are the new knights; we 

even have a mission. A microphysics of the migrant has replaced the 

macrogeometry of the sedentary. But this suppleness and clarity do not 

only present dangers, they are themselves a danger. First, supple segmen-

tarity runs the risk of reproducing in miniature the affections, the affecta-

tions, of the rigid: the family is replaced by a community, conjugality by a 

regime of exchange and migration; worse, micro-Oedipuses crop up, 

microfascisms lay down the law, the mother feels obliged to titillate her 

child, the father becomes a mommy. A dark light that falls from no star and 

emanates such sadness: this shifting segmentarity derives directly from the 

most rigid, for which it is indirect compensation. The more molar the 

aggregates become, the more molecular become their elements and the 

relations between their elements: molecular man for molar humanity. One 

deterritorializes, massifies, but only in order to knot and annul the mass 

movements and movements of deterritorialization, to invent all kinds of 

marginal reterritorializations even worse than the others. But above all, 

supple segmentarity brings dangers of its own that do not merely reproduce 

in small scale the dangers of molar segmentarity, which do not derive from 

them or compensate for them. As we have seen, microfascisms have a spe-

cificity of their own that can crystallize into a macro fascism, but may also 

float along the supple line on their own account and suffuse every little cell. 

A multitude of black holes may very well not become centralized, and acts 

instead as viruses adapting to the most varied situations, sinking voids in 

molecular perceptions and semiotics. Interactions without resonance. 

Instead of the great paranoid fear, we are trapped in a thousand little mono-

manias, self-evident truths, and clarities that gush from every black hole 

and no longer form a system, but are only rumble and buzz, blinding lights 

giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of 

justice, policeman, neighborhood SS man. We have overcome fear, we have 

sailed from the shores of security, only to enter a system that is no less 

concentricized, no less organized: the system of petty insecurities that 

leads everyone to their own black hole in which to turn dangerous, possess-

ing a clarity on their situation, role, and mission even more disturbing than 

the certitudes of the first line.

 

Power (Pouvoir) is the third danger, because it is on both lines simultane-

 

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ously. It stretches from the rigid segments with their overcoding and reso-

nance to the fine segmentations with their diffusion and interactions, and 

back again. Every man of power jumps from one line to the other, alternat-

ing between a petty and a lofty style, the rogue's style and the grandiloquent 

style, drugstore demagoguery and the imperialism of the high-ranking gov-

ernment man. But this whole chain and web of power is immersed in a 

world of mutant flows that eludes them. It is precisely its impotence that 

makes power so dangerous. The man of power will always want to stop the 

lines of flight, and to this end to trap and stabilize the mutation machine in 

the overcoding machine. But he can do so only by creating a void, in other 

words, by first stabilizing the overcoding machine itself by containing it 

within the local assemblage charged with effectuating it, in short, by giving 

the assemblage the dimensions of the machine. This is what takes place in 

the artificial conditions of totalitarianism or the "closed vessel."

 

But there is a fourth danger as well, and this is the one that interests us 

most, because it concerns the lines of flight themselves. We may well have 

presented these lines as a sort of mutation or creation drawn not only in the 

imagination but also in the very fabric of social reality; we may well have 

attributed to them the movement of the arrow and the speed of an 

absolute—but it would be oversimplifying to believe that the only risk they 

fear and confront is allowing themselves to be recaptured in the end, letting 

themselves be sealed in, tied up, reknotted, reterritorialized. They them-

selves emanate a strange despair, like an odor of death and immolation, a 

state of war from which one returns broken: they have their own dangers 

distinct from the ones previously discussed. This is exactly what led 

Fitzgerald to say: "I had a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a 

deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. No 

problem set—simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing. 

... My self-immolation was something sodden-dark."

30

 Why is the line of 

flight a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed, after having 

destroyed everything one could? This, precisely, is the fourth danger: the 

line of flight crossing the wall, getting out of the black holes, but instead of 

connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its valence, turning 
to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition. 
Like 

Kleist's line of flight, and the strange war he wages; like suicide, double sui-

cide, a way out that turns the line of flight into a line of death.

 

We are not invoking any kind of death drive. There are no internal 

drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is what 

the assemblage determines it to be. The assemblage that draws lines of 

flight is on the same level as they are, and is of the war machine type. Muta-

tions spring from this machine, which in no way has war as its object, but 

rather the emission of quanta of deterritorialization, the passage of mutant

 

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flows (in this sense, every creation is brought about by a war machine). 

There are many reasons to believe that the war machine is of a different ori-

gin, is a different assemblage, than the State apparatus. It is of nomadic ori-

gin and is directed against the State apparatus. One of the fundamental 

problems of the State is to appropriate this war machine that is foreign to it 

and make it a piece in its apparatus, in the form of a stable military institu-

tion; and the State has always encountered major difficulties in this. It is 

precisely when the war machine has reached the point that it has no other 

object but war, it is when it substitutes destruction for mutation, that it 

frees the most catastrophic charge. Mutation is in no way a transformation 

of war; on the contrary, war is like the fall or failure of mutation, the only 

object left for the war machine after it has lost its power to change. War, it 

must be said, is only the abominable residue of the war machine, either 

after it has allowed itself to be appropriated by the State apparatus, or even 

worse, has constructed itself a State apparatus capable only of destruction. 

When this happens, the war machine no longer draws mutant lines of 

flight, but a pure, cold line of abolition. (Later, we will propose a theory of 

the complex relation between the war machine and war.)

31

 

This brings us back to the paradox of fascism, and the way in which fas-

cism differs from totalitarianism. For totalitarianism is a State affair: it 

essentially concerns the relation between the State as a localized assem-

blage and the abstract machine of overcoding it effectuates. Even in the 

case of a military dictatorship, it is a State army, not a war machine, that 

takes power and elevates the State to the totalitarian stage. Totalitarianism 

is quintessentially conservative. Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war 

machine. When fascism builds itself a totalitarian State, it is not in the 

sense of a State army taking power, but of a war machine taking over the 

State. A bizarre remark by Virilio puts us on the trail: in fascism, the State 

is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal. There is in fascism a realized nihil-

ism. Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible 

lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an intense line of flight, which it 

transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition. It is curious that 

from the very beginning the Nazis announced to Germany what they were 

bringing: at once wedding bells and death, including their own death, and 

the death of the Germans. They thought they would perish but that their 

undertaking would be resumed, all across Europe, all over the world, 

throughout the solar system. And the people cheered, not because they did 

not understand, but because they wanted that death through the death of 

others. Like a will to wager everything you have every hand, to stake your 

own death against the death of others, and measure everything by 

"deleometers." Klaus Mann's novel, Mephisto, gives samplings of entirely 

ordinary Nazi speeches and conversations: "Heroism was something that

 

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was being ruled out of our lives. . . .  In reality, we are not marching forward, 

we are reeling, staggering. Our beloved Fiihrer is dragging us toward the 

shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness. How can we poets, we who 

have a special affinity for darkness and lower depths, not admire him? . . . 

Fires blazing on the horizon; rivers of blood in all the streets; and the fren-

zied dancing of the survivors, of those who are still spared, around the bod-
ies of the dead!"

32

  Suicide is presented not as a punishment but as the 

crowning glory of the death of others. One can always say that it is just a 

matter of foggy talk and ideology, nothing but ideology. But that is not true. 

The insufficiency of economic and political definitions of fascism does not 

simply imply a need to tack on vague, so-called ideological determinations. 

We prefer to follow Faye's inquiry into the precise formation of Nazi state-

ments, which are just as much in evidence in politics and economics as in 

the most absurd of conversations. They always contain the "stupid and 

repugnant" cry, Long live death!, even at the economic level, where the 

arms expansion replaces growth in consumption and where investment 

veers from the means of production toward the means of pure destruction. 

Paul Virilio's analysis strikes us as entirely correct in defining fascism not 

by the notion of the totalitarian State but by the notion of the suicidal State: 

so-called total war seems less a State undertaking than an undertaking of a 

war machine that appropriates the State and channels into it a flow of abso-

lute war whose only possible outcome is the suicide of the State itself. "The 

triggering of a hitherto unknown material process, one that is limitless and 

aimless. . . . Once triggered, its mechanism cannot stop at peace, for the 

indirect strategy effectively places the dominant powers outside the usual 

categories  of  space  and  time.  . . .   It  was  in  the  horror  of  daily  life  and  its 

environment that Hitler finally found his surest means of governing, the 

legitimation of his policies and military strategy; and it lasted right up to 

the end, for the ruins and horrors and crimes and chaos of total war, far 

from discharging the repulsive nature of its power, normally only increase 

its scope. Telegram 71 is the normal outcome: If the war is lost, may the 
nation perish. 
Here, Hitler decides to join forces with his enemies in order 

to complete the destruction of his own people, by obliterating the last 

remaining resources of its life-support system, civil reserves of every kind 

(potable water, fuel, provisions, etc.)."

33

 It was this reversion of the line of 

flight into a line of destruction that already animated the molecular 

focuses of fascism, and made them interact in a war machine instead of res-

onating in a State apparatus. A war machine that no longer had anything 
but war as its object 
and would rather annihilate its own servants than stop 

the destruction. All the dangers of the other lines pale by comparison.

 

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10. 173 0: Becoming-Intense, 

Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible 

. . .

 

 

232

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BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL ... D 233

 

Memories of a Moviegoer. I  recall the fine film Willard  (1972, Daniel 

Mann). A "B" movie perhaps, but a fine unpopular film: unpopular be-

cause the heroes are rats. My memory of it is not necessarily accurate. I will 

recount the story in broad outline. Willard lives with his authoritarian 

mother in the old family house. Dreadful Oedipal atmosphere. His mother 

orders him to destroy a litter of rats. He spares one (or two or several). After 

a violent argument, the mother, who "resembles" a dog, dies. The house is 

coveted by a businessman, and Willard is in danger of losing it. He likes the 

principal rat he saved, Ben, who proves to be of prodigious intelligence. 

There is also a white female rat, Ben's companion. Willard spends all his 

free time with them. They multiply. Willard takes the rat pack, led by Ben, 

to the home of the businessman, who is put to a terrible death. But he fool-

ishly takes his two favorites to the office with him and has no choice but to 

let the employees kill the white rat. Ben escapes, after throwing Willard a 

long, hard glare. Willard then experiences a pause in his destiny, in his 
becoming-rat.  He tries with all his might to remain among humans. He 

even responds to the advances of a young woman in the office who bears a 

strong "resemblance" to a rat—but it is only a resemblance. One day when 

he has invited the young woman over, all set to be conjugalized, 

reoedi-palized, Ben suddenly reappears, full of hate. Willard tries to 

drive him away, but succeeds only in driving away the young woman: he 

then is lured to the basement by Ben, where a pack of countless rats is 

waiting to tear him to shreds. It is like a tale; it is never disturbing.

 

It is all there: there is a becoming-animal not content to proceed by 

resemblance and for which resemblance, on the contrary, would represent 

an obstacle or stoppage; the proliferation of rats, the pack, brings a 

becoming-molecular that undermines the great molar powers of family, 

career, and conjugality; there is a sinister choice since there is a "favorite" 

in the pack with which a kind of contract of alliance, a hideous pact, is 

made; there is the institution of an assemblage, a war machine or criminal 

machine, which can reach the point of self-destruction; there is a circula-

tion of impersonal affects, an alternate current that disrupts signifying 

projects as well as subjective feelings, and constitutes a nonhuman sexual-

ity; and there is an irresistible deterritorialization that forestalls attempts 

at professional, conjugal, or Oedipal reterritorialization. (Are there Oedi-

pal animals with which one can "play Oedipus," play family, my little dog, 

my little cat, and then other animals that by contrast draw us into an irre-

sistible becoming? Or another hypothesis: Can the same animal be taken 

up by two opposing functions and movements, depending on the case?)

 

Memories of a Naturalist. One of the main problems of natural history 

was to conceptualize the relationships between animals. It is very different

 

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in this respect from later evolutionism, which defined itself in terms of 

genealogy, kinship, descent, and filiation. As we know, evolutionism would 

arrive at the idea of an evolution that does not necessarily operate by 

filiation. But it was unavoidable that it begin with the genealogical motif. 

Darwin himself treats the evolutionist theme of kinship and the naturalist 

theme of the sum and value of differences or resemblances as very separate 

things: groups that are equally related can display highly variable degrees 

of difference with respect to the ancestor. Precisely because natural history 

is concerned primarily with the sum and value of differences, it can con-

ceive of progressions and regressions, continuities and major breaks, but 

not an evolution in the strict sense, in other words, the possibility of a 

descent the degrees of modification of which depend on external condi-

tions. Natural history can think only in terms of relationships (between A 

and B), not in terms of production (from A to x).

 

But something very important transpires at the level of relationships. 

For natural history conceives of the relationships between animals in two 

ways: series and structure. In the case of a series, I say resembles b, b 

resembles c, etc.; all of these terms conform in varying degrees to a single, 

eminent term, perfection, or quality as the principle behind the series. This 

is exactly what the theologians used to call an analogy of proportion. In the 

case of a structure, I say is to as is to d; and each of these relationships 

realizes after its fashion the perfection under consideration: gills are to 

breathing under water as lungs are to breathing air; or the heart is to gills as 

the absence of a heart is to tracheas [in insects]. . . This is an analogy of pro-

portionality. In the first case, I have resemblances that differ from one 

another in a single series, and between series. In the second case, I have dif-

ferences that resemble each other within a single structure, and between 

structures. The first form of analogy passes for the most sensible and popu-

lar, and requires imagination; but the kind of imagination it requires is a 

studious one that has to take branchings in the series into account, fill in 

apparent ruptures, ward off false resemblances and graduate the true ones, 

and take both progressions and regressions or degraduations into account. 

The second form of analogy is considered royal because it requires instead 

all the resources of understanding (entendement), in order to define equiv-

alent relations by discovering, on the one hand, the independent variables 

that can be combined to form a structure and, on the other hand, the corre-

lates that entail one another within each structure. As different as they are, 

the two themes of series and structure have always coexisted in natural his-

tory; in appearance contradictory, in practice they have reached a more or 

less stable compromise.

1

 In the same way, the two figures of analogy coex-

isted in the minds of the theologians in various equilibriums. This is 

because in both cases Nature is conceived as an enormous mimesis: either

 

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in the form of a chain of beings perpetually imitating one another, progres-

sively and regressively, and tending toward the divine higher term they all 

imitate by graduated resemblance, as the model for and principle behind 

the series; or in the form of a mirror Imitation with nothing left to imitate 

because it itself is the model everything else imitates, this time by ordered 

difference. (This mimetic or mimological vision is what made the idea of 

an evolution-production possible at that moment.)

 

This problem is in no way behind us. Ideas do not die. Not that they 

survive simply as archaisms. At a given moment they may reach a scien-

tific stage, and then lose that status or emigrate to other sciences. Their 

application and status, even their form and content, may change; yet they 

retain something essential throughout the process, across the displace-

ment, in the distribution of a new domain. Ideas are always reusable, 

because they have been usable before, but in the most varied of actual 

modes. For, on the one hand, the relationships between animals are the 

object not only of science but also of dreams, symbolism, art and poetry, 

practice and practical use. And on the other hand, the relationships 

between animals are bound up with the relations between man and ani-

mal, man and woman, man and child, man and the elements, man and the 

physical and microphysical universe. The twofold idea "series-structure" 

crosses a scientific threshold at a certain moment; but it did not start there 

and it does not stay there, or else crosses over into other sciences, 

animating, for example, the human sciences, serving in the study of 

dreams, myths, and organizations. The history of ideas should never be 

continuous; it should be wary of resemblances, but also of descents or 

filiations; it should be content to mark the thresholds through which an 

idea passes, the journeys it takes that change its nature or object. Yet the 

objective relationships between animals have been applied to certain sub-

jective relations between man and animal, from the standpoint of a col-

lective imagination or a faculty of social understanding.

 

Jung elaborated a theory of the Archetype as collective unconscious; it 

assigns the animal a particularly important role in dreams, myths, and 

human collectivities. The animal is inseparable from a series exhibiting the 

double aspect of progression-regression, in which each term plays the role 

of a possible transformer of the libido (metamorphosis). A whole approach 

to the dream follows from this; given a troubling image, it becomes a ques-

tion of integrating it into its archetypal series. That series may include fem-

inine, masculine, or infantile sequences, as well as animal, vegetable, even 

elementary or molecular sequences. In contrast to natural history, man is 

now no longer the eminent term of the series; that term may be an animal 

for man, the lion, crab, bird of prey, or louse, in relation to a given act or 

function, in accordance with a given demand of the unconscious.

 

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Bachelard wrote a fine Jungian book when he elaborated the ramified 

series of Lautreamont, taking into account the speed coefficient of the 

metamorphoses and the degree of perfection of each term in relation to a 

pure aggressiveness as the principle of the series: the serpent's fang, the 

horn of the rhinoceros, the dog's tooth, the owl's beak; and higher up, the 

claw of the eagle or the vulture, the pincer of the crab, the legs of the louse, 

the suckers of the octopus. Throughout Jung's work a process of mimesis 

brings nature and culture together in its net, by means of analogies of pro-

portion in which the series and their terms, and above all the animals occu-

pying a middle position, assure cycles of conversion nature-culture-nature: 

archetypes as "analogical representations."

2

 

Is it by chance that structuralism so strongly denounced the prestige 

accorded the imagination, the establishment of resemblances in a series, 

the imitation pervading the entire series and carrying it to its term, and 

the identification with this final term? Nothing is more explicit than 

Levi-Strauss's famous texts on totemism: transcend external resem-

blances to arrive at internal homologies.

3

  It is no longer a question of 

instituting a serial organization of the imaginary, but instead a symbolic 

and structural order of understanding. It is no longer a question of gradu-

ating resemblances, ultimately arriving at an identification between Man 

and Animal at the heart of a mystical participation. It is a question of 

ordering differences to arrive at a correspondence of relations. The ani-

mal is distributed according to differential relations or distinctive oppo-

sitions between species; the same goes for human beings, according to the 

groups considered. When analyzing the institution of the totem, we do 

not say that this group of people identifies with that animal species. We 

say that what group A is to group B, species A' is to species B'. This method 

is profoundly different from the preceding one: given two human groups, 

each with its totem animal, we must discover the way in which the two 

totems entertain relations analogous to those between the two groups— 

the Crow is to the Falcon ...

 

The method also applies to Man-child, man-woman relations, etc. If we 

note, for example, that the warrior has a certain astonishing relation to the 

young woman, we refrain from establishing an imaginary series tying the 

two together; instead, we look for a term effecting an equivalence of rela-

tions. Thus Vernant can say that marriage is to the woman what war is to 

the man. The result is a homology between the virgin who refuses marriage 

and the warrior who disguises himself as a woman.

4

 In short, symbolic 

understanding replaces the analogy of proportion with an analogy of pro-

portionality; the serialization of resemblances with a structuration of dif-

ferences; the identification of terms with an equality of relations; the 

metamorphoses of the imagination with conceptual metaphors; the great

 

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continuity between nature and culture with a deep rift distributing corre-

spondences without resemblance between the two; the imitation of a pri-

mal model with a mimesis that is itself primary and without a model. A 

man can never say: "I am a bull, a wolf.. ." But he can say: "I am to a 

woman what the bull is to a cow, I am to another man what the wolf is to the 

sheep." Structuralism represents a great revolution; the whole world 

becomes more rational. Levi-Strauss is not content to grant the structural 

model all the prestige of a true classification system; he relegates the serial 

model to the dark domain of sacrifice, which he depicts as illusory, even 

devoid of good sense. The serial theme of sacrifice must yield to the struc-
tural theme of the institution of the totem, 
correctly understood. But here, 

as in natural history, many compromises are reached between archetypal 

series and symbolic structures.

5

 

Memories of a Bergsonian. None of the preceding satisfies us, from our 

restricted viewpoint. We believe in the existence of very special becom-

ings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting 

the animal no less than the human. "From 1730 to 1735, all we hear about 

are vampires." Structuralism clearly does not account for these becomings, 

since it is designed precisely to deny or at least denigrate their existence: a 

correspondence of relations does not add up to a becoming. When 

structuralism encounters becomings of this kind pervading a society, it 

sees them only as phenomena of degradation representing a deviation 

from the true order and pertaining to the adventures of diachrony. Yet in 

his study of myths, Levi-Strauss is always encountering these rapid acts by 

which a human becomes animal at the same time as the animal becomes 

... (Becomes what? Human, or something else?). It is always possible to try 

to explain these blocks ofbecomingby a correspondence between two rela-

tions, but to do so most certainly impoverishes the phenomenon under 

study. Must it not be admitted that myth as a frame of classification is quite 

incapable of registering these becomings, which are more like fragments of 

tales? Must we not lend credence to Jean Duvignaud's hypothesis that 

there are "anomic" phenomena pervading societies that are not degrada-

tions of the mythic order but irreducible dynamisms drawing lines of flight 

and implying other forms of expression than those of myth, even if myth 

recapitulates them in its own terms in order to curb them?

6

 Does it not 

seem that alongside the two models, sacrifice and series, totem institution 

and structure, there is still room for something else, something more secret, 

more subterranean: the sorcerer and becomings (expressed in tales instead 

of myths or rites)?

 

A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a 

resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification. The whole

 

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structuralist critique of the series seems irrefutable. To become is not to 
progress or regress along a series. Above all, becoming does not occur in the 
imagination, even when the imagination reaches the highest cosmic or 
dynamic level, as in Jung or Bachelard. Becomings-animal are neither 
dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue 
here? For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitat-
ing an animal, it is clear that the human being does not "really" become an 
animal any more than the animal "really" becomes something else. Becom-
ing produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we 
say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the 
block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that 
which becomes passes. Becoming can and should be qualified as be-
coming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal 
become. The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the ani-
mal the human being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal 
is real, even if that something other it becomes is not. This is the point to 
clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but also that it 
has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in another becom-
ing of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the 
first. This is the principle according to which there is a reality specific to 
becoming (the Bergsonian idea of a coexistence of very different "dura-
tions," superior or inferior to "ours," all of them in communication).

 

Finally, becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by 

descent and filiation. Becoming produces nothing by filiation; all filiation 
is imaginary. Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It con-
cerns alliance. If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the 
domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales 
and kingdoms, with no possible filiation. There is a block of becoming that 
snaps up the wasp and the orchid, but from which no wasp-orchid can ever 
descend. There is a block of becoming that takes hold of the cat and 
baboon, the alliance between which is effected by a C virus. There is a block 
of becoming between young roots and certain microorganisms, the alliance 
between which is effected by the materials synthesized in the leaves 
(rhizosphere). If there is originality in neoevolutionism, it is attributable in 
part to phenomena of this kind in which evolution does not go from some-
thing less differentiated to something more differentiated, in which it 
ceases to be a hereditary filiative evolution, becoming communicative or 
contagious. Accordingly, the term we would prefer for this form of evolu-
tion between heterogeneous terms is "involution," on the condition that 
involution is in no way confused with regression. Becoming is 
involu-tionary, involution is creative. To regress is to move in the 
direction of

 

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something less differentiated. But to involve is to form a block that runs its 

own line "between" the terms in play and beneath assignable relations.

 

Neoevolutionism seems important for two reasons: the animal is 

defined not by characteristics (specific, generic, etc.) but by populations 

that vary from milieu to milieu or within the same milieu; movement 

occurs not only, or not primarily, by filiative productions but also by 

transversal communications between heterogeneous populations. 

Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becom-

ing is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it 

regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corre-

sponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or pro-

ducing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its 

own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, "appearing," "being," "equal-

ing," or "producing."

 

Memories of a Sorcerer, I. A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a 

band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity. We sorcerers have 

always known that. It may very well be that other agencies, moreover very 

different from one another, have a different appraisal of the animal. One 

may retain or extract from the animal certain characteristics: species and 

genera, forms and functions, etc. Society and the State need animal charac-

teristics to use for classifying people; natural history and science need char-

acteristics in order to classify the animals themselves. Serialism and 

structuralism either graduate characteristics according to their resem-

blances, or order them according to their differences. Animal characteris-

tics can be mythic or scientific. But we are not interested in characteristics; 

what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, conta-

gion, peopling. I am legion. The Wolf-Man fascinated by several wolves 

watching him. What would a lone wolf be? Or a whale, a louse, a rat, a fly? 

Beelzebub is the Devil, but the Devil as lord of the flies. The wolf is not fun-

damentally a characteristic or a certain number of characteristics; it is a 

wolfing. The louse is a lousing, and so on. What is a cry independent of the 

population it appeals to or takes as its witness? Virginia Woolfs experi-

ences herself not as a monkey or a fish but as a troop of monkeys, a school of 

fish, according to her variable relations of becoming with the people she 

approaches. We do not wish to say that certain animals live in packs. We 

want nothing to do with ridiculous evolutionary classifications a la Lorenz, 

according to which there are inferior packs and superior societies. What we 

are saying is that every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack. That it has 

pack modes, rather than characteristics, even if further distinctions within 

these modes are called for. It is at this point that the human being encoun-

ters the animal. We do not become animal without a fascination for the

 

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pack, for multiplicity. A fascination for the outside? Or is the multiplicity 

that fascinates us already related to a multiplicity dwelling within us? In 

one of his masterpieces, H. P. Lovecraft recounts the story of Randolph 

Carter, who feels his "self reel and who experiences a fear worse than that 

of annihilation: "Carters of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate 

and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And 

more, there were Carters having nothing in common with earthly life, but 

moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems 

and galaxies and cosmic continua. .. . Merging with nothingness is peace-

ful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no 

longer a definite being distinguished from other beings," nor from all of the 

becomings running through us, "that is the nameless summit of agony and 

dread."

7

 Hofmannsthal, or rather Lord Chandos, becomes fascinated with 

a "people" of dying rats, and it is in him, through him, in the interstices of 

his disrupted self that the "soul of the animal bares its teeth at monsterous 

fate":

8

 not pity, but unnatural participation. Then a strange imperative 

wells up in him: either stop writing, or write like a rat. . . If the writer is a 

sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange 

becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, 

becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc. We will have to explain why. Many 

suicides by writers are explained by these unnatural participations, these 

unnatural nuptials. Writers are sorcerers because they experience the 

animal as the only population before which they are responsible in 

principle. The German preromantic Karl Philipp Moritz feels responsible 

not for the calves that die but before the calves that die and give him the 

incredible feeling of an unknown Nature—affect?  For the affect is not a 

personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power 

of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel. Who has 

not known the violence of these animal sequences, which uproot one from 

humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at one's bread like a 

rodent or giving one the yellow eyes of a feline? A fearsome involution 

calling us toward unheard-of becomings. These are not regressions, 

although fragments of regression, sequences of regression may enter in.

 

We must distinguish three kinds of animals. First, individuated ani-

mals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty 

history, "my" cat, "my" dog. These animals invite us to regress, draw us 

into a narcissistic contemplation, and they are the only kind of animal psy-

choanalysis understands, the better to discover a daddy, a mommy, a little 

brother behind them (when psychoanalysis talks about animals, animals 

learn to laugh): anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool. And then there is a 

second kind: animals with characteristics or attributes; genus, classifica-

tion, or State animals; animals as they are treated in the great divine myths,

 

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in such a way as to extract from them series or structures, archetypes or 

models (Jung is in any event profounder than Freud). Finally, there are 

more demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a 

becoming, a population, a tale . . .   Or  once  again,  cannot any animal be 

treated in all three ways? There is always the possibility that a given animal, 

a louse, a cheetah or an elephant, will be treated as a pet, my little beast. 

And at the other extreme, it is also possible for any animal to be treated in 

the mode of the pack or swarm; that is our way, fellow sorcerers. Even the 

cat, even the dog. And the shepherd, the animal trainer, the Devil, may 

have a favorite animal in the pack, although not at all in the way we were 

just discussing. Yes, any animal is or can be a pack, but to varying degrees 

of vocation that make it easier or harder to discover the multiplicity, or 

multiplicity-grade, an animal contains (actually or virtually according to 

the case). Schools, bands, herds, populations are not inferior social forms; 

they are affects and powers, involutions that grip every animal in a becom-

ing just as powerful as that of the human being with the animal.

 

Jorge Luis Borges, an author renowned for his excess of culture, botched 

at least two books, only the titles of which are nice: first, A Universal His-
tory of Infamy, 
because he did not see the sorcerer's fundamental distinc-

tion between deception and treason (becomings-animal are there from the 

start, on the treason side); second, his Manual de zoolog'iafantastica, where 

he not only adopts a composite and bland image of myth but also elimi-

nates all of the problems of the pack and the corresponding 

becoming-animal of the human being: "We have deliberately excluded 

from this manual legends of transformations of the human being, the 
lobizbn,  the werewolf, etc."

10

 Borges is interested only in characteristics, 

even the most fantastic ones, whereas sorcerers know that werewolves are 

bands, and vampires too, and that bands transform themselves into one 

another. But what exactly does that mean, the animal as band or pack? 

Does a band not imply a filiation, bringing us back to the reproduction of 

given characteristics? How can we conceive of a peopling, a propagation, a 

becoming that is without filiation or hereditary production? A multiplicity 

without the unity of an ancestor? It is quite simple; everybody knows it, 

but it is discussed only in secret. We oppose epidemic to filiation, 

contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, 

sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, 

epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are in 

themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself, 

but which begins over again every time, gaining that much more ground. 

Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the 

kingdoms of nature. Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing 

to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and 

require each other. The vampire

 

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does not filiate, it infects. The difference is that contagion, epidemic, 

involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human 

being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism. 

Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are 

neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural partici-

pations. That is the only way Nature operates—against itself. This is a far 

cry from filiative production or hereditary reproduction, in which the only 

differences retained are a simple duality between sexes within the same 

species, and small modifications across generations. For us, on the other 

hand, there are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, as many dif-

ferences as elements contributing to a process of contagion. We know that 

many beings pass between a man and a woman; they come from different 

worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they cannot be 

understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming. The Uni-

verse does not function by filiation. All we are saying is that animals are 

packs, and that packs form, develop, and are transformed by contagion.

 

These multiplicities with heterogeneous terms, cofunctioning by conta-

gion, enter certain assemblages; it is there that human beings effect their 

becomings-animal. But we should not confuse these dark assemblages, 

which stir what is deepest within us, with organizations such as the institu-

tion of the family and the State apparatus. We could cite hunting societies, 

war societies, secret societies, crime societies, etc. Becomings-animal are 

proper to them. We will not expect to find filiative regimes of the family 

type or modes of classification and attribution of the State or pre-State 

type or even serial organizations of the religious type. Despite appearances 

and possible confusions, this is not the site of origin or point of application 

for myths. These are tales, or narratives and statements of becoming. It is 

therefore absurd to establish a hierarchy even of animal collectivities from 

the standpoint of a whimsical evolutionism according to which packs are 

lower on the scale and are superseded by State or familial societies. On the 

contrary, there is a difference in nature. The origin of packs is entirely dif-

ferent from that of families and States; they continually work them from 

within and trouble them from without, with other forms of content, other 

forms of expression. The pack is simultaneously an animal reality, and the 

reality of the becoming-animal of the human being; contagion is simulta-

neously an animal peopling, and the propagation of the animal peopling of 

the human being. The hunting machine, the war machine, the crime 

machine entail all kinds of becomings-animal that are not articulated in 

myth, still less in totemism. Dumezil showed that becomings of this kind 

pertain essentially to the man of war, but only insofar as he is external to 

families and States, insofar as he upsets filiations and classifications. The 

war machine is always exterior to the State, even when the State uses it,

 

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appropriates it. The man of war has an entire becoming that implies multi-

plicity, celerity, ubiquity, metamorphosis and treason, the power of affect. 

Wolf-men, bear-men, wildcat-men, men of every animality, secret brother-

hoods, animate the battlefields. But so do the animal packs used by men in 

battle, or which trail the battles and take advantage of them. And together 

they spread contagion.

11

 There is a complex aggregate: the 

becoming-animal of men, packs of animals, elephants and rats, winds and 

tempests, bacteria sowing contagion. A single Furor.  War contained 

zoological sequences before it became bacteriological. It is in war, famine, 

and epidemic that werewolves and vampires proliferate. Any animal can 

be swept up in these packs and the corresponding becomings; cats have 

been seen on the battlefield, and even in armies. That is why the distinction 

we must make is less between kinds of animals than between the different 

states according to which they are integrated into family institutions, 

State apparatuses, war machines, etc. (and what is the relation of the 

writing machine and the musical machine to becomings-animal?)

 

Memories of a Sorcerer, II. Our first principle was: pack and contagion, 

the contagion of the pack, such is the path becoming-animal takes. But a 

second principle seemed to tell us the opposite: wherever there is multipli-

city, you will also find an exceptional individual, and it is with that individ-

ual that an alliance must be made in order to become-animal. There may be 

no such thing as a lone wolf, but there is a leader of the pack, a master of the 

pack, or else the old deposed head of the pack now living alone, there is the 

Loner, and there is the Demon. Willard has his favorite, the rat Ben, and 

only becomes-rat through his relation with him, in a kind of alliance of 

love, then of hate. Moby-Dick in its entirety is one of the greatest master-

pieces of becoming; Captain Ahab has an irresistible becoming-whale, but 

one that bypasses the pack or the school, operating directly through a mon-

strous alliance with the Unique, the Leviathan, Moby-Dick. There is 

always a pact with a demon; the demon sometimes appears as the head of 

the band, sometimes as the Loner on the sidelines of the pack, and some-

times as the higher Power (Puissance) of the band. The exceptional individ-

ual has many possible positions. Kafka, another great author of real 

becomings-animal, sings of mouse society; but Josephine, the mouse 

singer, sometimes holds a privileged position in the pack, sometimes a 

position outside the pack, and sometimes slips into and is lost in the ano-

nymity of the collective statements of the pack.

12

 In short, every Animal 

has its Anomalous. Let us clarify that: every animal swept up in its pack or 

multiplicity has its anomalous. It has been noted that the origin of the word 
anomal ("anomalous"), an adjective that has fallen into disuse in French, 

is very different from that of anormal ("abnormal"): a-normal, a Latin

 

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adjective lacking a noun in French, refers to that which is outside rules or 

goes against the rules, whereas an-omalie, a Greek noun that has lost its 

adjective, designates the unequal, the coarse, the rough, the cutting edge of 

deterritorialization.

13

 The abnormal can be defined only in terms of char-

acteristics, specific or generic; but the anomalous is a position or set of 

positions in relation to a multiplicity. Sorcerers therefore use the old adjec-

tive "anomalous" to situate the positions of the exceptional individual in 

the pack. It is always with the Anomalous, Moby-Dick or Josephine, that 

one enters into alliance to become-animal.

 

It does seem as though there is a contradiction: between the pack and the 

loner; between mass contagion and preferential alliance; between pure 

multiplicity and the exceptional individual; between the aleatory aggre-

gate and a predestined choice. And the contradiction is real: Ahab chooses 

Moby-Dick, in a choosing that exceeds him and comes from elsewhere, and 

in so doing breaks with the law of the whalers according to which one 

should first pursue the pack. Penthesilea shatters the law of the pack, the 

pack of women, the pack of she-dogs, by choosing Achilles as her favorite 

enemy. Yet it is by means of this anomalous choice that each enters into his 

or her becoming-animal, the becoming-dog of Penthesilea, the 

becoming-whale of Captain Ahab. We sorcerers know quite well that the 

contradictions are real but that real contradictions are not just for laughs. 

For the whole question is this: What exactly is the nature of the 

anomalous? What function does it have in relation to the band, to the pack? 

It is clear that the anomalous is not simply an exceptional individual; that 

would be to equate it with the family animal or pet, the Oedipalized animal 

as psychoanalysis sees it, as the image of the father, etc. Ahab's Moby-Dick 

is not like the little cat or dog owned by an elderly woman who honors 

and cherishes it. Lawrence's becoming-tortoise has nothing to do with a 

sentimental or domestic relation. Lawrence is another of the writers who 

leave us troubled and filled with admiration because they were able to tie 

their writing to real and unheard-of becomings. But the objection is raised 

against Lawrence: "Your tortoises aren't real!" And he answers: Possibly, 

but my becoming is, my becoming is real, even and especially if you have 

no way of judging it, because you're just little house dogs . . .

14

 The 

anomalous, the preferential element in the pack, has nothing to do with 

the preferred, domestic, and psychoanalytic individual. Nor is the 

anomalous the bearer of a species presenting specific or generic 

characteristics in their purest state; nor is it a model or unique specimen; 

nor is it the perfection of a type incarnate; nor is it the eminent term of a 

series; nor is it the basis of an absolutely harmonious correspondence. The 

anomalous is neither an individual nor a species; it has only affects, it has 

neither familiar or subjectified feelings, nor specific or significant 

characteristics. Human tenderness is as foreign to it

 

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as human classifications. Lovecraft applies the term "Outsider" to this 

thing or entity, the Thing, which arrives and passes at the edge, which is lin-

ear yet multiple, "teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an 

infectious disease, this nameless horror."

 

If the anomalous is neither an individual nor a species, then what is it? It 

is a phenomenon, but a phenomenon of bordering. This is our hypothesis: 

a multiplicity is defined not by the elements that compose it in extension, 

not by the characteristics that compose it in comprehension, but by the 

lines and dimensions it encompasses in "intension." If you change dimen-

sions, if you add or subtract one, you change multiplicity. Thus there is a 

borderline for each multiplicity; it is in no way a center but rather the envel-

oping line or farthest dimension, as a function of which it is possible to 

count the others, all those lines or dimensions constitute the pack at a given 

moment (beyond the borderline, the multiplicity changes nature). That is 

what Captain Ahab says to his first mate: I have no personal history with 

Moby-Dick, no revenge to take, any more than I have a myth to play out; 

but I do have a becoming! Moby-Dick is neither an individual nor a genus; 

he is the borderline, and I have to strike him to get at the pack as a whole, to 

reach the pack as a whole and pass beyond it. The elements of the pack are 

only imaginary "dummies," the characteristics of the pack are only sym-

bolic entities; all that counts is the borderline—the anomalous. "To me, 

the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me." The white wall. "Some-

times I think there is naught beyond. But 'tis enough."

15

 That the anoma-

lous is the borderline makes it easier for us to understand the various 

positions it occupies in relation to the pack or the multiplicity it borders, 

and the various positions occupied by a fascinated Self (Moi). It is now 

even possible to establish a classification system for packs while avoiding 

the pitfalls of an evolutionism that sees them only as an inferior collective 

stage (instead of taking into consideration the particular assemblages they 

bring into play). In any event, the pack has a borderline, and an anomalous 

position, whenever in a given space an animal is on the line or in the act of 

drawing the line in relation to which all the other members of the pack will 

fall into one of two halves, left or right: a peripheral position, such that it is 

impossible to tell if the anomalous is still in the band, already outside the 

band, or at the shifting boundary of the band. Sometimes each and every 

animal reaches this line or occupies this dynamic position, as in a swarm of 

mosquitoes, where "each individual moves randomly unless it sees the rest 

of [the swarm] in the same half-space; then it hurries to re-enter the group. 

Thus stability is assured in catastrophe by a barrier."**' Sometimes it is a 

specific animal that draws and occupies the borderline, as leader of the 

pack. Sometimes the borderline is defined or doubled by a being of another 

nature that no longer belongs to the pack, or never belonged to it, and that

 

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represents a power of another order, potentially acting as a threat as well as 

a trainer, outsider, etc. In any case, no band is without this phenomenon of 

bordering, or the anomalous. It is true that bands are also undermined by 

extremely varied forces that establish in them interior centers of the conju-

gal, familial, or State type, and that make them pass into an entirely differ-

ent form of sociability, replacing pack affects with family feelings or State 

intelligibilities. The center, or internal black holes, assumes the principal 

role. This is what evolutionism sees as progress, this adventure also befalls 

bands of humans when they reconstitute group familialism, or even 

authoritarianism or pack fascism.

 

Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the 

fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the 

village, or between villages. The important thing is their affinity with alli-

ance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed to that of filiation. 

The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance. The sorcerer has a 

relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous. The 

old-time theologians drew a clear distinction between two kinds of curses 

against sexuality. The first concerns sexuality as a process of filiation 

transmitting the original sin. But the second concerns it as a power of alli-

ance inspiring illicit unions or abominable loves. This differs signifi-

cantly from the first in that it tends to prevent procreation; since the 

demon does not himself have the ability to procreate, he must adopt indi-

rect means (for example, being the female succubus of a man and then 

becoming the male incubus of a woman, to whom he transmits the man's 

semen). It is true that the relations between alliance and filiation come to 

be regulated by laws of marriage, but even then alliance retains a danger-

ous and contagious power. Leach was able to demonstrate that despite all 

the exceptions that seemingly disprove the rule, the sorcerer belongs first 

of all to a group united to the group over which he or she exercises influ-

ence only by alliance: thus in a matrilineal group we look to the father's 

side for the sorcerer or witch. And there is an entire evolution of sorcery 

depending on whether the relation of alliance acquires permanence or 

assumes political weight.

17

 In order to produce werewolves in your own 

family it is not enough to resemble a wolf, or to live like a wolf: the pact 

with the Devil must be coupled with an alliance with another family, and 

it is the return of this alliance to the first family, the reaction of this alli-

ance on the first family, that produces werewolves by feedback effect. A 

fine tale by Erckmann and Chatrian, Hugues-le-loup, assembles the tradi-

tions concerning this complex situation.

18

 

The contradiction between the two themes, "contagion through the ani-

mal as pack," and "pact with the anomalous as exceptional being," is pro-

gressively fading. It is with good reason that Leach links the two concepts of

 

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alliance and contagion, pact and epidemic. Analyzing Kachin sorcery, he 

writes: "Witch influence was thought to be transmitted in the food that the 

women prepared. . . . Kachin witchcraft is contagious rather than heredi-

tary ... it is associated with affinity, not filiation."

19

 Alliance or the pact is 

the form of expression for an infection or epidemic constituting the form of 

content. In sorcery, blood is of the order of contagion and alliance. It can be 

said that becoming-animal is an affair of sorcery because (1) it implies an 

initial relation of alliance with a demon; (2) the demon functions as the 

borderline of an animal pack, into which the human being passes or in 

which his or her becoming takes place, by contagion; (3) this becoming 

itself implies a second alliance, with another human group; (4) this new 

borderline between the two groups guides the contagion of animal and 

human being within the pack. There is an entire politics of 

becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in 

assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the 

State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are 

oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized 

institutions, groups all the more secret for being extrinsic, in other words, 

anomic. If becoming-animal takes the form of a Temptation, and of 

monsters aroused in the imagination by the demon, it is because it is 

accompanied, at its origin as in its undertaking, by a rupture with the 

central institutions that have established themselves or seek to become 

established.

 

Let us cite pell-mell, not as mixes to be made, but as different cases to be 

studied: becomings-animal in the war machine, wildmen of all kinds (the 

war machine indeed comes from without, it is extrinsic to the State, which 

treats the warrior as an anomalous power); becomings-animal in crime 

societies, leopard-men, crocodile-men (when the State prohibits tribal and 

local wars); becomings-animal in riot groups (when the Church and State 

are faced with peasant movements containing a sorcery component, which 

they repress by setting up a whole trial and legal system designed to expose 

pacts with the Devil); becomings-animal in asceticism groups, the grazing 

anchorite or wild-beast anchorite (the asceticism machine is in an anoma-

lous position, on a line of flight, off to the side of the Church, and disputes 

the Church's pretension to set itself up as an imperial institution);

20 

becomings-animal in societies practicing sexual initiation of the "sacred 

deflowerer" type, wolf-men, goat-men, etc. (who claim an Alliance supe-

rior and exterior to the order of families; families have to win from them 

the right to regulate their own alliances, to determine them according to 

relations of complementary lines of descent, and to domesticate this unbri-

dled power of alliance).

21

 

The politics of becomings-animal remains, of course, extremely ambig-

uous. For societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated

 

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these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to relations of 

totemic or symbolic correspondence. States have always appropriated the 

war machine in the form of national armies that strictly limit the be-

comings of the warrior. The Church has always burned sorcerers, or 

reintegrated anchorites into the toned-down image of a series of saints 

whose only remaining relation to animals is strangely familiar, domestic. 

Families have always warded off the demonic Alliance gnawing at them, in 

order to regulate alliances among themselves as they see fit. We have seen 

sorcerers serve as leaders, rally to the cause of despotism, create the 

countersorcery of exorcism, pass over to the side of the family and descent. 

But this spells the death of the sorcerer, and also the death of becoming. We 

have seen becoming spawn nothing more than a big domestic dog, as in 

Henry Miller's damnation ("it would be better to feign, to pretend to be an 

animal, a dog for example, and catch the bone thrown to me from time to 

time") or Fitzgerald's ("I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you 

throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand"). Invert 

Faust's formula: So that is what it was, the form of the traveling scholar? A 

mere poodle?

22

 

Memories of a Sorcerer, III. Exclusive importance should not be 

attached to becomings-animal. Rather, they are segments occupying a 

median region. On the near side, we encounter becomings-woman, 

becomings-child (becoming-woman, more than any other becoming, pos-

sesses a special introductory power; it is not so much that women are 

witches, but that sorcery proceeds by way of this becoming-woman). On 

the far side, we find becomings-elementary, -cellular, -molecular, and even 

becomings-imperceptible. Toward what void does the witch's broom lead? 

And where is Moby-Dick leading Ahab so silently? Lovecraft's hero 

encounters strange animals, but he finally reaches the ultimate regions of a 

Continuum inhabited by unnameable waves and unfindable particles. Sci-

ence fiction has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, veg-

etable, and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, mole-

cules, and things imperceptible.

23

 The properly musical content of music is 

plied by becomings-woman, becomings-child, becomings-animal; how-

ever, it tends, under all sorts of influences, having to do also with the instru-

ments, to become progressively more molecular in a kind of cosmic 

lapping through which the inaudible makes itself heard and the impercep-

tible appears as such: no longer the songbird, but the sound molecule.

 

If the experimentation with drugs has left its mark on everyone, even 

nonusers, it is because it changed the perceptive coordinates of space-time 

and introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which 

becomings-molecular take over where becomings-animal leave off. Carlos 

Castaneda's

 

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books clearly illustrate this evolution, or rather this involution, in which 

the affects of a becoming-dog, for example, are succeeded by those of a 

becoming-molecular, microperceptions of water, air, etc. A man totters 

from one door to the next and disappears into thin air: "All I can tell you is 

that we are fluid, luminous beings made of fibers."

24

 All so-called initiatory 

journeys include these thresholds and doors where becoming itself 

becomes, and where one changes becoming depending on the "hour" of the 

world, the circles of hell, or the stages of a journey that sets scales, forms, 

and cries in variation. From the howling of animals to the wailing of ele-

ments and particles.

 

Thus packs, or multiplicities, continually transform themselves into 

each other, cross over into each other. Werewolves become vampires when 

they die. This is not surprising, since becoming and multiplicity are the 

same thing. A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of 

unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it 

has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing 
its nature. 
Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it 
amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed 
of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually 
transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its 
thresholds and doors. 
For example, the Wolf-Man's pack of wolves also 

becomes a swarm of bees, and a field of anuses, and a collection of small 

holes and tiny ulcerations (the theme of contagion): all these heterogene-

ous elements compose "the" multiplicity of symbiosis and becoming. If we 

imagined the position of a fascinated Self, it was because the multiplicity 

toward which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation 

of another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside. In fact, 

the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. 

Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline functioning as Anomalous, but 

there is a string of borderlines, a continuous line of borderlines (fiber) fol-

lowing which the multiplicity changes. And at each threshold or door, a 

new pact? A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an 

animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imper-

ceptible. Every fiber is a Universe fiber. A fiber strung across borderlines 

constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization. It is evident that the 

Anomalous, the Outsider, has several functions: not only does it border 

each multiplicity, of which it determines the temporary or local stability 

(with the highest number of dimensions possible under the circum-

stances), not only is it the precondition for the alliance necessary to becom-

ing, but it also carries the transformations of becoming or crossings of 

multiplicities always farther down the line of flight. Moby-Dick is the 
White Wall bordering the pack; he is also the demonic Term of the Alliance;

 

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finally, he is the terrible Fishing Line with nothing on the other end, the line 

that crosses the wall and drags the captain .. . where? Into the void . . .

 

The error we must guard against is to believe that there is a kind of logi-

cal order to this string, these crossings or transformations. It is already 

going too far to postulate an order descending from the animal to the vege-

table, then to molecules, to particles. Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its 

becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a 

whole galaxy. Nor is there a preformed logical order to these heterogenei-

ties, the Wolf-Man's wolves, bees, anuses, little scars. Of course, sorcery 

always codifies certain transformations of becomings. Take a novel 

steeped in the traditions of sorcery, Alexandre Dumas's Menem de loups; 

in a first pact, the man of the fringes gets the Devil to agree to make his 

wishes come true, with the stipulation that a lock of his hair turn red each 

time he gets a wish. We are in the hair-multiplicity, hair is the borderline. 

The man himself takes a position on the wolves' borderline, as leader of the 

pack. Then when he no longer has a single human hair left, a second pact 

makes him become-wolf himself; it is an endless becoming since he is only 

vulnerable one day in the year. We are aware that between the 

hair-multiplicity and the wolf-multiplicity it is always possible to induce 

an order of resemblance (red like the fur of a wolf); but the resemblance 

remains quite secondary (the wolf of the transformation is black, with one 

white hair). In fact, there is a first multiplicity, of hair, taken up in a 

becoming-red fur; and a second multiplicity, of wolves, which in turn takes 

up the becoming-animal of the man. Between the two, there is threshold 

and fiber, symbiosis of or passage between heterogeneities. That is how we 

sorcerers operate. Not following a logical order, but following alogical con-

sistencies or compatibilities. The reason is simple. It is because no one, not 

even God, can say in advance whether two borderlines will string together 

or form a fiber, whether a given multiplicity will or will not cross over into 

another given multiplicity, or even if given heterogeneous elements will 

enter symbiosis, will form a consistent, or cofunctioning, multiplicity sus-

ceptible to transformation. No one can say where the line of flight will pass: 

Will it let itself get bogged down and fall back to the Oedipal family animal, 

a mere poodle? Or will it succumb to another danger, for example, turning 

into a line of abolition, annihilation, self-destruction, Ahab,Ahab... ?We 

are all too familiar with the dangers of the line of flight, and with its ambi-

guities. The risks are ever-present, but it is always possible to have the good 

fortune of avoiding them. Case by case, we can tell whether the line is con-

sistent, in other words, whether the heterogeneities effectively function in 

a multiplicity of symbiosis, whether the multiplicities are effectively trans-

formed through the becomings of passage. Let us take an example as simple 

as: starts practicing piano again. Is it an Oedipal return to childhood? Is it

 

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a way of dying, in a kind of sonorous abolition? Is it a new borderline, an 

active line that will bring other becomings entirely different from becom-

ing or rebecoming a pianist, that will induce a transformation of all of the 

preceding assemblages to which was prisoner? Is it a way out? Is it a pact 

with the Devil? Schizoanalysis, or pragmatics, has no other meaning: Make 

a rhizome. But you don't know what you can make a rhizome with, you 

don't know which subterranean stem is effectively going to make a rhi-

zome, or enter a becoming, people your desert. So experiment.

 

That's easy to say? Although there is no preformed logical order to 

becomings and multiplicities, there are criteria, and the important thing is 

that they not be used after the fact, that they be applied in the course of 

events, that they be sufficient to guide us through the dangers. If multiplici-

ties are defined and transformed by the borderline that determines in each 

instance their number of dimensions, we can conceive of the possibility of 

laying them out on a plane, the borderlines succeeding one another, form-

ing a broken line. It is only in appearance that a plane of this kind "reduces" 

the number of dimensions; for it gathers in all the dimensions to the extent 

that flat multiplicities—which nonetheless have an increasing or decreas-
ing number of dimensions
—are inscribed upon it. It is in grandiose and 

simplified terms that Lovecraft attempted to pronounce sorcery's final 

word: "Then the waves increased in strength and sought to improve his 

understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his pres-

ent fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of 

space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding 

figure of one more dimension—as a square is cut from a cube, or a circle 

from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from 

corresponding forms of four dimensions, which men know only through 

guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five dimen-

sions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infin-

ity."

25

 Far from reducing the multiplicities' number of dimensions to two, 

the plane of consistency cuts across them all, intersects them in order to 

bring into coexistence any number of multiplicities, with any number of 

dimensions. The plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete 

forms. Therefore all becomings are written like sorcerers' drawings on this 

plane of consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for 

them. This is the only criterion to prevent them from bogging down, or 

veering into the void. The only question is: Does a given becoming reach 

that point? Can a given multiplicity flatten and conserve all its dimensions 

in this way, like a pressed flower that remains just as alive dry? Lawrence, in 

his becoming-tortoise, moves from the most obstinate animal dynamism 

to the abstract, pure geometry of scales and "cleavages of division," with-

out, however, losing any of the dynamism: he pushes becoming-tortoise all

 

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the way to the plane of consistency.

26

 Everything becomes imperceptible, 

everything is becoming-imperceptible on the plane of consistency, which is 

nevertheless precisely where the imperceptible is seen and heard. It is the 

Planomenon, or the Rhizosphere, the Criterium (and still other names, as 

the number of dimensions increases). At n  dimensions, it is called the 

Hypersphere, the Mechanosphere. It is the abstract Figure, or rather, since 

it has no form itself, the abstract Machine of which each concrete assem-

blage is a multiplicity, a becoming, a segment, a vibration. And the abstract 

machine is the intersection of them all.

 

Waves are vibrations, shifting borderlines inscribed on the plane of con-

sistency as so many abstractions. The abstract machine of the waves. In 
The Waves, Virginia Woolf—who made all of her life and work a passage, a 

becoming, all kinds of becomings between ages, sexes, elements, and king-

doms—intermingles seven characters, Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, 

Rhoda, Suzanne, and Percival. But each of these characters, with his or her 

name, its individuality, designates a multiplicity (for example, Bernard 

and the school offish). Each is simultaneously in this multiplicity and at its 

edge, and crosses over into the others. Percival is like the ultimate multipli-

city enveloping the greatest number of dimensions. But he is not yet the 

plane of consistency. Although Rhoda thinks she sees him rising out of the 

sea, no, it is not he. "When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; 

now it is upright—a column; now a fountain.. .. Behind it roars the sea. It 

is beyond our reach."

27

 Each advances like a wave, but on the plane of con-

sistency they are a single abstract Wave whose vibration propagates follow-

ing a line of flight or deterritorialization traversing the entire plane (each 

chapter of Woolf s novel is preceded by a meditation on an aspect of the 

waves, on one of their hours, on one of their becomings).

 

Memories of a Theologian. Theology is very strict on the following point: 

there are no werewolves, human beings cannot become animal. That is 

because there is no transformation of essential forms; they are inalienable 

and only entertain relations of analogy. The Devil and the witch, and the 

pact between them, are no less real for that, for there is in reality a local 
movement  
that is properly diabolical. Theology distinguishes two cases, 

used as models during the Inquisition: that of Ulysses' companions, and 

that of Diomedes' companions, the imaginary vision and the spell. In the 

first, the subject believes him- or herself to be transformed into an animal, 

pig, ox, or wolf, and the observers believe it too; but this is an internal local 

movement bringing sensible images back to the imagination and bouncing 

them off external meanings. In the second, the Devil "assumes" real ani-

mal bodies, even transporting the accidents and affects befalling them to 

other bodies (for example, a cat or a wolf that has been taken over by the

 

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Devil can receive wounds that are relayed to an exactly corresponding part 

of a human body).

28

 This is a way of saying that the human being does not 

become animal in reality, but that there is nevertheless a demonic reality of 

the becoming-animal of the human being. Therefore it is certain that the 

demon performs local transports of all kinds. The Devil is a transporter; he 

transports humors, affects, or even bodies (the Inquisition brooks no com-

promises on this power of the Devil: the witch's broom, or "the Devil take 

you"). But these transports cross neither the barrier of essential forms nor 

that of substances or subjects.

 

There is another, altogether different, problem concerning the laws of 

nature that has to do not with demonology but with alchemy, and above all 

physics. It is the problem of accidental forms, distinct from both essential 

forms and determined subjects. For accidental forms are susceptible to 
more and less: more or less charitable, but also more or less white, more or 

less warm. A degree of heat is a perfectly individuated warmth distinct 

from the substance or the subject that receives it. A degree of heat can enter 

into composition with a degree of whiteness, or with another degree of 

heat, to form a third unique individuality distinct from that of the subject. 

What is the individuality of a day, a season, an event? A shorter day and a 

longer day are not, strictly speaking, extensions but degrees proper to 

extension, just as there are degrees proper to heat, color, etc. An accidental 

form therefore has a "latitude" constituted by a certain number of 

composable individuations. A degree, an intensity, is an individual, a 
Haecceity that enters into composition with other degrees, other intensi-

ties, to form another individual. Can latitude be explained by the fact that 

the subject participates more or less in the accidental form? But do these 

degrees of participation not imply a flutter, a vibration in the form itself 

that is not reducible to the properties of a subject? Moreover, if intensities 

of heat are not composed by addition, it is because one must add their 

respective subjects; it is the subjects that prevent the heat of the whole from 

increasing. All the more reason to effect distributions of intensity, to estab-

lish latitudes that are "deformedly deformed," speeds, slownesses, and 

degrees of all kinds corresponding to a body or set of bodies taken as longi-

tude: a cartography.

29

 In short, between substantial forms and determined 

subjects, between the two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic 

local transports but a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, 

events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from 

those of the well-formed subjects that receive them.

 

Memories of a Spinozist, I. Substantial or essential forms have been cri-

tiqued in many different ways. Spinoza's approach is radical: Arrive at ele-

ments that no longer have either form or function, that are abstract in this

 

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sense even though they are perfectly real. They are distinguished solely by 

movement and rest, slowness and speed. They are not atoms, in other 

words, finite elements still endowed with form. Nor are they indefinitely 

divisible. They are infinitely small, ultimate parts of an actual infinity, laid 

out on the same plane of consistency or composition. They are not defined 

by their number since they always come in infinities. However, depending 

on their degree of speed or the relation of movement and rest into which 

they enter, they belong to a given Individual, which may itself be part of 

another Individual governed by another, more complex, relation, and so 

on to infinity. There are thus smaller and larger infinities, not by virtue of 

their number, but by virtue of the composition of the relation into which 

their parts enter. Thus each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the 

whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities. 

The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine, 

abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and 

individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering 

into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations. There is therefore 

a unity to the plane of nature, which applies equally to the inanimate and 

the animate, the artificial and the natural. This plane has nothing to do 

with a form or a figure, nor with a design or a function. Its unity has nothing 

to do with a ground buried deep within things, nor with an end or a project 

in the mind of God. Instead, it is a plane upon which everything is laid out, 

and which is like the intersection of all forms, the machine of all functions; 

its dimensions, however, increase with those of the multiplicities of indi-

vidualities it cuts across. It is a fixed plane, upon which things are dis-

tinguished from one another only by speed and slowness. A plane of 

immanence or univocality opposed to analogy. The One is said with a single 

meaning of all the multiple. Being expresses in a single meaning all that 

differs. What we are talking about is not the unity of substance but the infinity 

of the modifications that are part of one another on this unique plane of life.

 

The never-ending debate between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: 

both agree at least in denouncing resemblances, or imaginary, sensible 

analogies, but in Cuvier, scientific definition concerns the relations 

between organs, and between organs and functions. Cuvier thus takes anal-

ogy to the scientific stage, making it an analogy of proportionality. The 

unity of the plane, according to him, can only be a unity of analogy, there-

fore a transcendent unity that cannot be realized without fragmenting into 

distinct branches, according to irreducible, uncrossable, heterogeneous 

compositions. Baer would later add: according to noncommunicating 

types of development and differentiation. The plane is a hidden plan(e) of 

organization, a structure or genesis. Geoffroy has an entirely different

 

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point of view because he goes beyond organs and functions to abstract ele-

ments he terms "anatomical," even to particles, pure materials that enter 

into various combinations, forming a given organ and assuming a given 

function depending on their degree of speed or slowness. Speed and slow-

ness, movement and rest, tardiness and rapidity subordinate not only the 

forms of structure but also the types of development. This approach later 

reappears in an evolutionist framework, with Perrier's tachygenesis and 

differential rates of growth in allometry: species as kinematic entities that 

are either precocious or retarded. (Even the question of fertility is less one 

of form and function than speed; do the paternal chromosomes arrive early 

enough to be incorporated into the nuclei?) In any case, there is a pure 

plane of immanence, univocality, composition, upon which everything is 

given, upon which unformed elements and materials dance that are distin-

guished from one another only by their speed and that enter into this or 

that individuated assemblage depending on their connections, their rela-

tions of movement. A fixed plane of life upon which everything stirs, slows 

down or accelerates. A single abstract Animal for all the assemblages that 

effectuate it. A unique plane of consistency or composition for the 

cephalo-pod and the vertebrate; for the vertebrate to become an Octopus or 

Cuttlefish, all it would have to do is fold itself in two fast enough to fuse 

the elements of the halves of its back together, then bring its pelvis up to 

the nape of its neck and gather its limbs together into one of its extremities, 

like "a clown who throws his head and shoulders back and walks on his 

head and hands."

30

  Plication.  It is no longer a question of organs and 

functions, and of a transcendent Plane that can preside over their 

organization only by means of analogical relations and types of divergent 

development. It is a question not of organization but of composition; not 

of development or differentiation but of movement and rest, speed and 

slowness. It is a question of elements and particles, which do or do not 

arrive fast enough to effect a passage, a becoming or jump on the same 

plane of pure immanence. And if there are in fact jumps, rifts between 

assemblages, it is not by virtue of their essential irreducibility but rather 

because there are always elements that do not arrive on time, or arrive 

after everything is over; thus it is necessary to pass through fog, to cross 

voids, to have lead times and delays, which are themselves part of the 

plane of immanence. Even the failures are part of the plane. We must try to 

conceive of this world in which a single fixed plane—which we shall call a 

plane of absolute immobility or  absolute movement—is traversed by 

nonformal elements of relative speed that enter this or that individuated 

assemblage depending on their degrees of speed and slowness. A plane of 

consistency peopled by anonymous matter, by infinite bits of impalpable 

matter entering into varying connections.

 

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Children are Spinozists. When Little Hans talks about a 

"peepee-maker," he is referring not to an organ or an organic function but 

basically to a material, in other words, to an aggregate whose elements 

vary according to its connections, its relations of movement and rest, the 

different individuated assemblages it enters. Does a girl have a 

peepee-maker? The boy says yes, and not by analogy, nor in order to 

conjure away a fear of castration. It is obvious that girls have a 

peepee-maker because they effectively pee: a machinic functioning rather 

than an organic function. Quite simply, the same material has different 

connections, different relations of movement and rest, enters different 

assemblages in the case of the boy and the girl (a girl does not pee standing 

or into the distance). Does a locomotive have a peepee-maker? Yes, in yet 

another machinic assemblage. Chairs don't have them: but that is because 

the elements of the chair were not able to integrate this material into their 

relations, or decomposed the relation with that material to the point that it 

yielded something else, a rung, for example. It has been noted that for 

children an organ has "a thousand vicissitudes," that it is "difficult to 

localize, difficult to identify, it is in turn a bone, an engine, excrement, the 

baby, a hand, daddy's heart..." This is not at all because the organ is 

experienced as a part-object. It is because the organ is exactly what its 

elements make it according to their relation of movement or rest, and the 

way in which this relation combines with or splits off from that of 

neighboring elements. This is not animism, any more than it is mechanism; 

rather, it is universal machinism: a plane of consistency occupied by an 

immense abstract machine comprising an infinite number of assemblages. 

Children's questions are poorly understood if they are not seen as 

question-machines; that is why indefinite articles play so important a role 

in these questions (a  belly, a child, a horse, a chair, "how is a  person 

made?"). Spinozism is the becoming-child of the philosopher. We call the 
longitude of a body the particle aggregates belonging to that body in a given 

relation; these aggregates are part of each other depending on the 

composition of the relation that defines the individuated assemblage of 

the body.

 

Memories of a Spinozist, II. There is another aspect to Spinoza. To every 

relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness grouping together an 

infinity of parts, there corresponds a degree of power. To the relations com-

posing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there correspond inten-

sities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power to act; these 

intensities come from external parts or from the individual's own parts. 

Affects are becomings. Spinoza asks: What can a body do? We call the lati-
tude 
of a body the affects of which it is capable at a given degree of power, or 

rather within the limits of that degree. Latitude is made up of intensive parts

 

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falling under a capacity, and longitude of extensive parts falling under a rela-
tion. 
In the same way that we avoided defining a body by its organs and 

functions, we will avoid defining it by Species or Genus characteristics; 

instead we will seek to count its affects. This kind of study is called 

ethology, and this is the sense in which Spinoza wrote a true Ethics. A race-

horse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox. 

Von Uexkull, in defining animal worlds, looks for the active and passive 

affects of which the animal is capable in the individuated assemblage of 

which it is a part. For example, the Tick, attracted by the light, hoists itself 

up to the tip of a branch; it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and lets 

itself fall when one passes beneath the branch; it digs into its skin, at the 

least hairy place it can find. Just three affects; the rest of the time the tick 

sleeps, sometimes for years on end, indifferent to all that goes on in the 

immense forest. Its degree of power is indeed bounded by two limits: the 

optimal limit of the feast after which it dies, and the pessimal limit of the 

fast as it waits. It will be said that the tick's three affects assume generic and 

specific characteristics, organs and functions, legs and snout. This is true 

from the standpoint of physiology, but not from the standpoint of Ethics. 

Quite the contrary, in Ethics the organic characteristics derive from longi-

tude and its relations, from latitude and its degrees. We know nothing 

about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects 

are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with 

the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by 

it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in com-

posing a more powerful body.

 

Once again, we turn to children. Note how they talk about animals, and 

are moved by them. They make a list of affects. Little Hans's horse is not 

representative but affective. It is not a member of a species but an element 

or individual in a machinic assemblage: draft horse-omnibus-street. It is 

defined by a list of active and passive affects in the context of the 

individuated assemblage it is part of: having eyes blocked by blinders, hav-

ing a bit and a bridle, being proud, having a big peepee-maker, pulling 

heavy loads, being whipped, falling, making a din with its legs, biting, etc. 

These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a 

horse "can do." They indeed have an optimal limit at the summit of horse-

power, but also a pessimal threshold: a horse falls down in the street! It can't 

get back on its feet with that heavy load on its back, and the excessive whip-

ping; a horse is going to die!—this was an ordinary sight in those days 

(Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Nijinsky lamented it). So just what is the 

becoming-horse of Little Hans? Hans is also taken up in an assemblage: his 

mother's bed, the paternal element, the house, the cafe across the street, the 

nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street, the winning

 

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of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the dangers of winning it, the 

fall, shame .. . These are not phantasies or subjective reveries: it is not a 

question of imitating a horse, "playing" horse, identifying with one, or 

even experiencing feelings of pity or sympathy. Neither does it have to do 

with an objective analogy between assemblages. The question is whether 

Little Hans can endow his own elements with the relations of movement 

and rest, the affects, that would make it become horse, forms and subjects 

aside. Is there an as yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans's 

nor the horse's, but that of the becoming-horse of Hans? An assemblage, 

for example, in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show 

something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever? And in what 

way would that ameliorate Hans's problem, to what extent would it open a 

way out that had been previously blocked? When Hofmannsthal contem-

plates the death throes of a rat, it is in him that the animal "bares his teeth at 

monstrous fate." This is not a feeling of pity, as he makes clear; still less an 

identification. It is a composition of speeds and affects involving entirely 

different individuals, a symbiosis; it makes the rat become a thought, a 

feverish thought in the man, at the same time as the man becomes a rat 

gnashing its teeth in its death throes. The rat and the man are in no way the 

same thing, but Being expresses them both in a single meaning in a lan-

guage that is no longer that of words, in a matter that is no longer that of 

forms, in an affectability that is no longer that of subjects. Unnatural par-
ticipation. 
But the plane of composition, the plane of Nature, is precisely 

for participations of this kind, and continually makes and unmakes their 

assemblages, employing every artifice.

 

This is not an analogy, or a product of the imagination, but a composi-

tion of speeds and affects on the plane of consistency: a plan(e), a program, 

or rather a diagram, a problem, a question-machine. Vladimir Slepian for-

mulates the "problem" in a thoroughly curious text: I'm hungry, always 

hungry, a man should not be hungry, so I'll have to become a dog—but 

how? This will not involve imitating a dog, nor an analogy of relations. I 

must succeed in endowing the parts of my body with relations of speed and 

slowness that will make it become dog, in an original assemblage proceed-

ing neither by resemblance nor by analogy. For I cannot become dog with-

out the dog itself becoming something else. Slepian gets the idea of using 

shoes to solve this problem, the artifice of the shoes. If I wear shoes on my 

hands, then their elements will enter into a new relation, resulting in the 

affect or becoming I seek. But how will I be able to tie the shoe on my sec-

ond hand, once the first is already occupied? With my mouth, which in 

turn receives an investment in the assemblage, becoming a dog muzzle, 

insofar as a dog muzzle is now used to tie shoes. At each stage of the prob-

lem, what needs to be done is not to compare two organs but to place ele-

 

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ments or materials in a relation that uproots the organ from its specificity, 

making it become "with" the other organ. But this becoming, which has 

already taken in feet, hands, and mouth, will nevertheless fail. It founders 

on the tail. The tail would have had to have been invested, forced to exhibit 

elements common to the sexual organ and the caudal appendage, so that 

the former would be taken up in the becoming-dog of the man at the same 

time as the latter were taken up in a becoming of the dog, in another becom-

ing that would also be part of the assemblage. The plan(e) fails, Slepian fal-

ters on this point. The tail remains an organ of the man on the one hand and 

an appendage of the dog on the other; their relations do not enter into com-

position in the new assemblage. This is where psychoanalytic drift sets in, 

bringing back all the cliches about the tail, the mother, the childhood mem-

ory of the mother threading needles, all those concrete figures and sym-

bolic analogies.

31

 But this is the way Slepian wants it in this fine text. For 

there is a way in which the failure of the plan(e) is part of the plan(e) itself: 

The plan(e) is infinite, you can start it in a thousand different ways; you will 

always find something that comes too late or too early, forcing you to 

recompose all of your relations of speed and slowness, all of your affects, 

and to rearrange the overall assemblage. An infinite undertaking. But there 

is another way in which the plan(e) fails; this time, it is because another 
plan(e) 
returns full force, breaking the becoming-animal, folding the ani-

mal back onto the animal and the person onto the person, recognizing only 

resemblances between elements and analogies between relations. Slepian 

confronts both dangers.

 

We wish to make a simple point about psychoanalysis: from the begin-

ning, it has often encountered the question of the becomings-animal of the 

human being: in children, who continually undergo becomings of this 

kind; in fetishism and in particular masochism, which continually con-

front this problem. The least that can be said is that the psychoanalysts, 

even Jung, did not understand, or did not want to understand. They killed 

becoming-animal, in the adult as in the child. They saw nothing. They see 

the animal as a representative of drives, or a representation of the parents. 

They do not see the reality of a becoming-animal, that it is affect in itself, 

the drive in person, and represents nothing. There exist no other drives 

than the assemblages themselves. There are two classic texts in which 

Freud sees nothing but the father in the becoming-horse of Hans, and 

Ferenczi sees the same in the becoming-cock of Arpad. The horse's blind-

ers are the father's eyeglasses, the black around its mouth is his mustache, 

its kicks are the parents' "lovemaking." Not one word about Hans's rela-

tion to the street, on how the street was forbidden to him, on what it is for a 

child to see the spectacle "a horse is proud, a blinded horse pulls, a horse 

falls, a horse is whipped..." Psychoanalysis has no feeling for unnatural

 

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participations, nor for the assemblages a child can mount in order to solve 
a problem from which all exits are barred him: a plan(e), not a phantasy. 
Similarly, fewer stupidities would be uttered on the topic of pain, humilia-
tion, and anxiety in masochism if it were understood that it is the 
becomings-animal that lead the masochism, not the other way around. 
There are always apparatuses, tools, engines involved, there are always 
artifices and constraints used in taking Nature to the fullest. That is 
because it is necessary to annul the organs, to shut them away so that their 
liberated elements can enter into the new relations from which the 
becoming-animal, and the circulation of affects within the machinic 
assemblage, will result. As we have seen elsewhere, this was the case for the 
mask, the bridle, the bit, and the penis sheath in Equus eroticus: paradoxi-
cally, in the becoming-horse assemblage the man subdues his own "instinc-
tive" forces while the animal transmits to him its "acquired" forces. 
Reversal, unnatural participation. And the boots of the woman-master 
function to annul the leg as a human organ, to make the elements of the leg 
enter a relation suited to the overall assemblage: "In this way, it will no 
longer be women's legs that have an effect on me . . ,"

32

 But to break the 

becoming-animal all that is needed is to extract a segment from it, to 
abstract one of its moments, to fail to take into account its internal speeds 
and slownesses, to arrest the circulation of affects. Then nothing remains 
but imaginary resemblances between terms, or symbolic analogies 
between relations. This segment refers to the father, that relation of move-
ment and rest refers to the primal scene, etc. It must be recognized that psy-
choanalysis alone is not enough to bring about this breakage. It only brings 
out a danger inherent in becoming. There is always the danger of finding 
yourself "playing" the animal, the domestic Oedipal animal, Miller going 
bowwow and taking a bone, Fitzgerald licking your hand, Slepian returning 
to his mother, or the old man playing horse or dog on an erotic postcard 
from 1900 (and "playing" at being a wild animal would be no better). 
Becomings-animal continually run these dangers.

 

Memories of a Haecceity. A body is not defined by the form that deter-

mines it nor as a determinate substance or subject nor by the organs it pos-

sesses or the functions it fulfills. On the plane of consistency, a body is 
defined only by a longitude and a latitude: 
in other words the sum total of 

the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement 

and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive 

affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude). 

Nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds. The credit 

goes to Spinoza for calling attention to these two dimensions of the Body,

 

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and for having defined the plane of Nature as pure longitude and latitude. 

Latitude and longitude are the two elements of a cartography.

 

There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, 

subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it.

33

 A sea-

son, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking 

nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a 

subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of rela-

tions of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to 

affect and be affected. When demonology expounds upon the diabolical 

art of local movements and transports of affect, it also notes the impor-

tance of rain, hail, wind, pestilential air, or air polluted by noxious parti-

cles, favorable conditions for these transports. Tales must contain 

haecceities that are not simply emplacements, but concrete individuations 

that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and 

subjects. Among types of civilizations, the Orient has many more 

individuations by haecceity than by subjectivity or substantiality: the 

haiku, for example, must include indicators as so many floating lines con-

stituting a complex individual. In Charlotte Bronte, everything is in terms 

of wind, things, people, faces, loves, words. Lorca's "five in the evening," 

when love falls and fascism rises. That awful five in the evening! We say, 

"What a story!" "What heat!" "What a life!" to designate a very singular 

individuation. The hours of the day in Lawrence, in Faulkner. A degree of 

heat, an intensity of white, are perfect individualities; and a degree of heat 

can combine in latitude with another degree to form a new individual, as in 

a body that is cold here and hot there depending on its longitude. Norwe-

gian omelette. A degree of heat can combine with an intensity of white, as 

in certain white skies of a hot summer. This is in no way an individuality of 

the instant, as opposed to the individuality of permanences or durations. A 

tear-off calendar has just as much time as a perpetual calendar, although 

the time in question is not the same. There are animals that live no longer 

than a day or an hour; conversely, a group of years can be as long as the most 

durable subject or object. We can conceive of an abstract time that is equal 

for haecceities and for subjects or things. Between the extreme slownesses 

and vertiginous speeds of geology and astronomy, Michel Tournier places 

meteorology, where meteors live at our pace: "A cloud forms in the sky like 

an image in my brain, the wind blows like I breathe, a rainbow spans the 

horizon for as long as my heart needs to reconcile itself to life, the summer 

passes like vacation drifts by." But is it by chance that in Tournier's novel 

this certitude can come only to a twin hero who is deformed and 

desubjectified, and has acquired a certain ubiquity?

34

 Even when times are 

abstractly equal, the individuation of a life is not the same as the 

individuation of the subject that leads it or serves as its support. It is not the

 

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same Plane: in the first case, it is the plane of consistency or of composition 

of haecceities, which knows only speeds and affects; and in the second case, 

it is the altogether different plane of forms, substances, and subjects. And it 

is not in the same time, the same temporality. Aeon: the indefinite time of 

the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides 

that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time 

not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is 

both going to happen and has just happened. Chronos:  the time of 

measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines 

a subject.

35 

Boulez distinguishes tempo and nontempo in music: the 

"pulsed time" of a formal and functional music based on values versus the 

"nonpulsed time" of a floating music, both floating and machinic, which 

has nothing but speeds or differences in dynamic.

36

  In  short,  the 

difference is not at all between the ephemeral and the durable, nor even 

between the regular and the irregular, but between two modes of 

individuation, two modes of temporality.

 

We must avoid an oversimplified conciliation, as though there were on 

the one hand formed subjects, of the thing or person type, and on the other 

hand spatiotemporal coordinates of the haecceity type. For you will yield 

nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that 

you are nothing but that. When the face becomes a haecceity: "It seemed a 

curious mixture that simply made do with time, weather and these peo-

ple."

37

 You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses 

between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the 

individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a 

climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity). Or at 

least you can have it, you can reach it. A cloud of locusts carried in by the 

wind at five in the evening; a vampire who goes out at night, a werewolf at 

full moon. It should not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a 

decor or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things 

and people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage in its individuated 

aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longi-

tude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and sub-

jects, which belong to another plane. It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and 

the child, that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that 

are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life. The 

street enters into composition with the horse, just as the dying rat enters 

into composition with the air, and the beast and the full moon enter into 

composition with each other. At most, we may distinguish assemblage 

haecceities (a body considered only as longitude and latitude) and 

interassemblage haecceities, which also mark the potentialities of becom-

ing within each assemblage (the milieu of intersection of the longitudes

 

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and latitudes). But the two are strictly inseparable. Climate, wind, season, 

hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that pop-

ulate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be 

read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock. The 

becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five 

o'clock is this animal! This animal is this place! "The thin dog is running 

in the road, this dog is the road," cries Virginia Woolf. That is how we 

need to feel. Spatiotemporal relations, determinations, are not predicates 

of the thing but dimensions of multiplicities. The street is as much a part 

of the omnibus-horse assemblage as the Hans assemblage the 

becoming-horse of which it initiates. We are all five o'clock in the evening, 

or another hour, or rather two hours simultaneously, the optimal and the 

pessimal, noon-midnight, but distributed in a variable fashion. The plane 

of consistency contains only haecceities, along intersecting lines. Forms 

and subjects are not of that world. Virginia Woolf s walk through the 

crowd, among the taxis. Taking a walk is a haecceity; never again will 

Mrs. Dalloway say to herself, "I am this, I am that, he is this, he is that." And 

"She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a 

knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.... She 

always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one 

day."

38

 Haecceity, fog, glare. A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, 

origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, 

only of lines. It is a rhizome.

 

And it is not the same language, at least not the same usage of language. 

For if the plane of consistency only has haecceities for content, it also has 

its own particular semiotic to serve as expression. A plane of content and a 

plane of expression. This semiotic is composed above all of proper names, 

verbs in the infinitive and indefinite articles or pronouns. Indefinite article 
+ proper name 
infinitive verb constitutes the basic chain of expression, 

correlative to the least formalized contents, from the standpoint of a 

semiotic that has freed itself from both formal signifiances and personal 

subjectifications. In the first place, the verb in the infinitive is in no way 

indeterminate with respect to time; it expresses the floating, nonpulsed 

time proper to Aeon, in other words, the time of the pure event or of becom-

ing, which articulates relative speeds and slownesses independently of the 

chronometric or chronological values that time assumes in the other 

modes. There is good reason to oppose the infinitive as mode and tense of 

becoming to all of the other modes and tenses, which pertain to Chronos 

since they form pulsations or values of being (the verb "to be" is precisely 

the only one that has no infinitive, or rather the infinitive of which is only 

an indeterminate, empty expression, taken abstractly to designate the sum 

total of definite modes and tenses).

39

 Second, the proper name is no way

 

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the indicator of a subject; thus it seems useless to ask whether its operation 

resembles the nomination of a species, according to whether the subject is 

considered to be of another nature than that of the Form under which it is 

classified, or only the ultimate act of that Form, the limit of classifica-

tion.

40

 The proper name does not indicate a subject; nor does a noun take 

on the value of a proper name as a function of a form or a species. The 

proper name fundamentally designates something that is of the order of 

the event, of becoming or of the haecceity. It is the military men and meteo-

rologists who hold the secret of proper names, when they give them to a 

strategic operation or a hurricane. The proper name is not the subject of a 

tense but the agent of an infinitive. It marks a longitude and a latitude. If 

Tick, Wolf, Horse, etc., are true proper names, they are so not by virtue of 

the specific and generic denominators that characterize them but of the 

speeds that compose them and the affects that fill them; it is by virtue of the 

event they are in themselves and in the assemblages—the becoming-horse 

of Little Hans, the becoming-wolf of the Were [which etymologically 

means "man"—Trans.], the becoming-tick of the Stoic (other proper 

names).

 

Third, the indefinite article and the indefinite pronoun are no more 

indeterminate than the infinitive. Or rather they are lacking a determina-

tion only insofar as they are applied to a form that is itself indeterminate, 

or to a determinable subject. On the other hand, they lack nothing when 

they introduce haecceities, events, the individuation of which does not 

pass into a form and is not effected by a subject. The indefinite then has 

maximum determination: once upon a time; a child is being beaten; a horse 

is falling ... Here, the elements in play find their individuation in the 

assemblage of which they are a part, independent of the form of their con-

cept and the subjectivity of their person. We have remarked several times 

the extent to which children use the indefinite not as something indetermi-

nate but, on the contrary, as an individuating function within a collectivity. 

That is why we are dumbfounded by the efforts of psychoanalysis, which 

desperately wants there to be something definite hidden behind the indefi-

nite, a possessive, a person. When the child says "a belly," "a horse," "how 

do people grow up?" "someone is beating child," the psychoanalyst hears 

"my belly," "the father," "will I grow up to be like daddy?" The psychoana-

lyst asks: Who is being beaten, and by whom?

41

 Even linguistics is not 

immune from the same prejudice, inasmuch as it is inseparable from a 

personology; according to linguistics, in addition to the indefinite -article 

and the pronoun, the third-person pronoun also lacks the determination of 

subjectivity that is proper to the first two persons and is supposedly the 

necessary condition for all enunciation.

42

 

We believe on the contrary that the third person indefinite, 

HE

,

 THEY

,

 

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implies no indetermination from this point of view; it ties the statement to 

a collective assemblage, as its necessary condition, rather than to a subject 

of the enunciation. Blanchot is correct in saying that 

ONE 

and 

HE

one is 

dying, he is unhappy—in no way take the place of a subject, but instead do 

away with any subject in favor of an assemblage of the haecceity type that 

carries or brings out the event insofar as it is unformed and incapable of 

being effectuated by persons ("something happens to them that they can 

only get a grip on again by letting go of their ability to say I").

43

 The HE does 

not represent a subject but rather makes a diagram of an assemblage. It 

does not overcode statements, it does not transcend them as do the first 

two persons; on the contrary, it prevents them from falling under the tyr-

anny of subjective or signifying constellations, under the regime of empty 

redundancies. The contents of the chains of expression it articulates are 

those that can be assembled for a maximum number of occurrences and 

becomings. "They arrive like fate... where do they come from, how have 

they pushed this far .. .?"

44

 He or one, indefinite article, proper name, 

infinitive verb: 

HANS 

TO BECOME HORSE

,

 A PACK NAMED WOLF TO LOOK AT

 

HE, ONE TO DIE, WASP TO MEET ORCHID, THEY ARRIVE HUNS. Classified ads,

 

telegraphic machines on the plane of consistency (once again, we are 

reminded of the procedures of Chinese poetry and the rules for translation 

suggested by the best commentators).

45

 

Memories of a Plan(e) Maker. Perhaps there are two planes, or two ways 

of conceptualizing the plane. The plane can be a hidden principle, which 

makes visible what is seen and audible what is heard, etc., which at every 

instant causes the given to be given, in this or that state, at this or that 

moment. But the plane itself is not given. It is by nature hidden. It can only 

be inferred, induced, concluded from that to which it gives rise (simultane-

ously or successively, synchronically or diachronically). A plane of this 

kind is as much a plan(e) of organization as of development: it is structural 

or genetic, and both at once, structure and genesis, the structural plan(e) of 

formed organizations with their developments, the genetic plan(e) of evo-

lutionary developments with their organizations. These are only nuances 

of this first conception of the plane. To accord these nuances too much 

importance would prevent us from grasping something more important; 

that the plan(e), conceived or made in this fashion, always concerns the 

development of forms and the formation of subjects. A hidden structure 

necessary for forms, a secret signifier necessary for subjects. It ensues that 

the plan(e) itself will not be given. It exists only in a supplementary dimen-

sion to that to which it gives rise (n +1). This makes it a teleological plan(e), 

a design, a mental principle. It is a plan(e) of transcendence. It is a plan(e) 

of analogy, either because it assigns the eminent term of a development or

 

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because it establishes the proportional relations of a structure. It may be in 

the mind of a god, or in the unconscious of life, of the soul, or of language: it 

is always concluded from its own effects. It is always inferred. Even if it is 
said to be immanent, 
it is so only by absence, analogically (metaphorically, 

metonymically, etc.). The tree is given in the seed, but as a function of a 

plan(e) that is not given. The same applies to music. The developmental or 

organizational principle does not appear in itself, in a direct relation with 

that which develops or is organized: There is a transcendent compositional 

principle that is not of the nature of sound, that is not "audible" by itself or 

for itself. This opens the way for all possible interpretations. Forms and 

their developments, and subjects and their formations, relate to a plan(e) 

that operates as a transcendent unity or hidden principle. The plan(e) can 

always be described, but as a part aside, as ungiven in that to which it gives 

rise. Is this not how even Balzac, even Proust, describe their work's plan(e) 

of organization or development, as though in a metalanguage? Is not 

Stockhausen also obliged to describe the structure of his sound forms as 

existing "alongside" them, since he is unable to make it audible? Life 

plan(e), music plan(e), writing plan(e), it's all the same: a plan(e) that can-

not be given as such, that can only be inferred from the forms it develops 

and the subjects it forms, since it is for these forms and these subjects.

 

Then there is an altogether different plane, or an altogether different 

conception of the plane. Here, there are no longer any forms or develop-

ments of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation of subjects. There is 

no structure, any more than there is genesis. There are only relations of 

movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at 

least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and 

particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless indi-

viduations that constitute collective assemblages. Nothing develops, but 

things arrive late or early, and form this or that assemblage depending on 

their compositions of speed. Nothing subjectifies, but haecceities form 

according to compositions of nonsubjectified powers or affects. We call 

this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haec-

ceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to the plan(e) 

of organization or development). It is necessarily a plane of immanence 

and univocality. We therefore call it the plane of Nature, although nature 

has nothing to do with it, since on this plane there is no distinction between 

the natural and the artificial. However many dimensions it may have, it 

never has a supplementary dimension to that which transpires upon it. 

That alone makes it natural and immanent. The same goes for the principle 

of contradiction: this plane could also be called the plane of 

noncontradiction. The plane of consistency could be called the plane of 

nonconsistency. It is a geometrical plane, no longer tied to a mental design

 

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but to an abstract design. Its number of dimensions continually increases 

as what happens happens, but even so it loses nothing of its planitude. It is 

thus a plane of proliferation, peopling, contagion; but this proliferation of 

material has nothing to do with an evolution, the development of a form or 

the filiation of forms. Still less is it a regression leading back to a principle. 

It is on the contrary an involution, in which form is constantly being dis-

solved, freeing times and speeds. It is a fixed plane, a fixed sound plane, or 

visual plane, or writing plane, etc. Here, fixed does not mean immobile: it 

is the absolute state of movement as well as of rest, from which all relative 

speeds and slownesses spring, and nothing but them. Certain modern 

musicians oppose the transcendent plan(e) of organization, which is said 

to have dominated all of Western classical music, to the immanent sound 

plane, which is always given along with that to which it gives rise, brings the 

imperceptible to perception, and carries only differential speeds and 

slownesses in a kind of molecular lapping: the work of art must mark sec-
onds, tenths and hundredths of seconds.

46

 Or rather it is a question of a free-

ing of time, Aeon, a nonpulsed time for a floating music, as Boulez says, an 

electronic music in which forms are replaced by pure modifications of 

speed. It is undoubtedly John Cage who first and most perfectly deployed 

this fixed sound plane, which affirms a process against all structure and 

genesis, a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation 

against any kind of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest 

also marks the absolute state of movement. The same could be said of the 

fixed visual plane: Godard, for example, effectively carries the fixed 

plane of cinema to this state where forms dissolve, and all that subsists are 

tiny variations of speed between movements in composition. Nathalie 

Sarraute, for her part, proposes a clear distinction between two planes of 

writing: a transcendent plan(e) that organizes and develops forms (genres, 

themes, motifs) and assigns and develops subjects (personages, characters, 

feelings); and an altogether different plane that liberates the particles of an 

anonymous matter, allowing them to communicate through the "enve-

lope" of forms and subjects, retaining between them only relations of 

movement and rest, speed and slowness, floating affects, so that the plane 

itself is perceived at the same time as it allows us to perceive the impercep-

tible (the microplane, the molecular plane).

47

 So from the point of view of a 

well-founded abstraction, we can make it seem as though the two planes, 

the two conceptions of the plane, were in clear and absolute opposition. 

From this point of view, we can say, You can see the difference between the 

following two types of propositions: (1) forms develop and subjects form as 

a function of a plan(e) that can only be inferred (the planfe] of organi-

zation-development); (2) there are only speeds and slownesses between 

unformed elements, and affects between nonsubjectified powers, as a func-

 

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tion of a plane that is necessarily given at the same time as that to which it 

gives rise (the plane of consistency or composition).

48

 

Let us consider three major cases from nineteenth-century German lit-

erature, Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche. First, Holderlin's extraordinary 

composition, Hyperion, as analyzed by Robert Rovini: the importance of 

haecceities of the season type. These constitute, in two different ways, the 

"frame of the narrative" (plan[e]) and the details of what happens within 

that frame (the assemblages and interassemblages).

49

 He also notes how the 

succession of the seasons and the superposition of the same season from 

different years dissolves forms and persons and gives rise to movements, 

speeds, delays, and affects, as if as the narrative progressed something were 

escaping from an impalpable matter. And perhaps also the relation to a 

"realpolitik," to a war machine, to a musical machine of dissonance.

 

Kleist: everything with him, in his writing as in his life, becomes speed 

and slowness. A succession of catatonic freezes and extreme velocities, 

fainting spells and shooting arrows. Sleep on your steed, then take off at a 

gallop. Jump from one assemblage to another, with the aid of a faint, by 

crossing a void. Kleist multiplies "life plan(e)s," but his voids and failures, 

his leaps, earthquakes, and plagues are always included on a single plane. 

The plane is not a principle of organization but a means of transportation. 

No form develops, no subject forms; affects are displaced, becomings cata-

pult forward and combine into blocks, like the becoming-woman of Achil-

les and the becoming-dog of Penthesilea. Kleist offers a wonderful 

explanation of how forms and persons are only appearances produced by 

the displacement of a center of gravity on an abstract line, and by the con-

junction of these lines on a plane of immanence. He is fascinated by bears; 

they are impossible to fool because their cruel little eyes see through 

appearances to the true "soul of movement," the Gemut or nonsubjective 

affect: the becoming-bear of Kleist. Even death can only be conceptualized 

as the intersection of elementary reactions of different speeds. A skull 
exploding, 
one of Kleist's obsessions. All of Kleist's work is traversed by a 

war machine invoked against the State, by a musical machine invoked 

against painting or the "picture." It is odd how Goethe and Hegel hated this 

new kind of writing. Because for them the plan(e) must indissolubly be a 

harmonious development of Form and a regulated formation of the Sub-

ject, personage, or character (the sentimental education, the interior and 

substantial solidity of the character, the harmony or analogy of the forms 

and continuity of development, the cult of the State, etc.). Their concep-

tion of the Plane is totally opposed to that of Kleist. The anti-Goetheism, 

anti-Hegelianism of Kleist, and already of Holderlin. Goethe gets to the 

crux of the matter when he reproaches Kleist for simultaneously setting up 

a pure "stationary process" that is like the fixed plane, introducing voids

 

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and jumps that prevent any development of a central character, and mobi-

lizing a violence of affects that causes an extreme confusion of feelings.

50

 

Nietzsche does the same thing by different means. There is no longer 

any development of forms or formation of subjects. He criticizes Wagner 

for retaining too much harmonic form, and too many pedagogical person-

ages, or "characters": too much Hegel and Goethe. Now Bizet, on the other 

hand, Nietzsche says ... It seems to us that fragmentary writing is not so 

much the issue in Nietzsche. It is instead speeds and slownesses: not writ-

ing slowly or rapidly, but rather writing, and everything else besides, as a 

production of speeds and slownesses between particles. No form will resist 

that, no character or subject will survive it. Zarathustra is only speeds and 

slownesses, and the eternal return, the life of the eternal return, is the first 

great concrete freeing of nonpulsed time. Ecce Homo has only individ-

uations by haecceities. It is inevitable that the Plan(e), thus conceived, will 

always fail, but that the failures will be an integral part of the plan(e): See 

the multitude of plans for The Will to Power. For a given aphorism, it is 

always possible, even necessary, to introduce new relations of speed and 

slowness between its elements that truly make it change assemblages, jump 

from one assemblage to the next (the issue is therefore not the fragment). 

As Cage says, it is of the nature of the plan(e) that it fail.

51

 Precisely because 

it is not a plan(e) of organization, development, or formation, but of 

nonvoluntary transmutation. Or Boulez: "Program the machine so that 

each time a tape is played on it, it produces different time characteristics." 

So the plan(e)—life plan(e), writing plan(e), music plan(e)—must neces-

sarily fail for it is impossible to be faithful to it; but the failures are a part of 

the plan(e) for the plan(e) expands or shrinks along with the dimensions of 

that which it deploys in each instance (planitude of n  dimensions). A 

strange machine that is simultaneously a machine of war, music, and 

contagion-proliferation-involution.

 

Why does the opposition between the two kinds of planes lead to a still 

more abstract hypothesis? Because one continually passes from one to the 

other, by unnoticeable degrees and without being aware of it, or one be-

comes aware of it only afterward. Because one continually reconstitutes 

one plane atop another, or extricates one from the other. For example, all 

we need to do is to sink the floating plane of immanence, bury it in the 

depths of Nature instead of allowing it to play freely on the surface, for it to 

pass to the other side and assume the role of a ground that can no longer be 

anything more than a principle of analogy from the standpoint of organiza-

tion, and a law of continuity from the standpoint of development.

52

 The 

plane of organization or development effectively covers what we have 

called stratification: Forms and subjects, organs and functions, are 

"strata" or relations between strata. The plane of consistency or imma-

 

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nence, on the other hand, implies a destratification of all of Nature, by 

even the most artificial of means. The plane of consistency is the body 

without organs. Pure relations of speed and slowness between particles 

imply movements of deterritorialization, just as pure affects imply an 

enterprise of desubjectification. Moreover, the plane of consistency does 

not preexist the movements of deterritorialization that unravel it, the lines 

of flight that draw it and cause it to rise to the surface, the becomings that 

compose it. The plane of organization is constantly working away at the 

plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or inter-

rupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify 

them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth. Conversely, 

the plane of consistency is constantly extricating itself from the plane of 

organization, causing particles to spin off the strata, scrambling forms by 

dint of speed or slowness, breaking down functions by means of assem-

blages or microassemblages. But once again, so much caution is needed to 

prevent the plane of consistency from becoming a pure plane of abolition 

or death, to prevent the involution from turning into a regression to the 

undifferentiated. Is it not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a mini-

mum of forms and functions, a minimal subject from which to extract 

materials, affects, and assemblages?

 

In fact, the opposition we should set up between the two planes is that 

between two abstract poles: for example, to the transcendent, organiza-

tional plane of Western music based on sound forms and their develop-

ment, we oppose the immanent plane of consistency of Eastern music, 

composed of speeds and slownesses, movements and rest. In keeping with 

our concrete hypothesis, the whole becoming of Western music, all musical 

becoming, implies a minimum of sound forms and even of melodic and 

harmonic functions; speeds and slownesses are made to pass across them, 

and it is precisely these speeds and slownesses that reduce the forms and 

functions to the minimum. Beethoven produced the most astonishing 

polyphonic richness with relatively scanty themes of three or four notes. 

There is a material proliferation that goes hand in hand with a dissolution 

of form (involution) but is at the same time accompanied by a continuous 

development of form. Perhaps Schumann's genius is the most striking case 

of form being developed only for the relations of speed and slowness one 

materially and emotionally assigns it. Music has always submitted its 

forms and motifs to temporal transformations, augmentations or diminu-

tions, slowdowns or accelerations, which do not occur solely according to 

laws of organization or even of development. Expanding and contracting 

microintervals are at play within coded intervals. Wagner and the 

post-Wagnerians free variations of speed between sound particles to an 

even greater extent. Ravel and Debussy retain just enough form to shatter 

it,

 

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affect it, modify it through speeds and slownesses. Bolero  is the classic 

example, nearly a caricature, of a machinic assemblage that preserves a 

minimum of form in order to take it to the bursting point. Boulez speaks of 

proliferations of little motifs, accumulations of little notes that proceed 

kinematically and affectively, sweeping away a simple form by adding indi-

cations of speed to it; this allows one to produce extremely complex 

dynamic relations on the basis of intrinsically simple formal relations. 

Even a rubato by Chopin cannot be reproduced because it will have differ-

ent time characteristics at each playing.

53

 It is as though an immense plane 

of consistency of variable speed were forever sweeping up forms and func-

tions, forms and subjects, extracting from them particles and affects. A 

clock keeping a whole assortment of times.

 

What is a girl, what is a group of girls? Proust at least has shown us once 

and for all that their individuation, collective or singular, proceeds not by 

subjectivity but by haecceity, pure haecceity. "Fugitive beings." They are 

pure relations of speeds and slownesses, and nothing else. A girl is late on 

account of her speed: she did too many things, crossed too many spaces in 

relation to the relative time of the person waiting for her. Thus her apparent 

slowness is transformed into the breakneck speed of our waiting. It must be 

said in this connection, and for the whole of the Recherche du temps perdu, 

that Swann does not at all occupy the same position as the narrator. Swann 

is not a rough sketch or precursor of the narrator, except secondarily and at 

rare moments. They are not at all on the same plane. Swann is always think-

ing and feeling in terms of subjects, forms, resemblances between subjects, 

and correspondences between forms. For him, one of Odette's lies is a form 

whose secret subjective content must be discovered, provoking amateur 

detective activity. To him Vinteuil's music is a form that must evoke some-

thing else, fall back on something else, echo other forms, whether paint-

ings, faces, or landscapes. Although the narrator may follow in Swann's 

footsteps, he is nonetheless in a different element, on a different plane. One 

of Albertine's lies is nearly devoid of content; it tends on the contrary to 

merge with the emission of a particle issuing from the eyes of the beloved, a 

particle that stands only for itself and travels too fast through the narrator's 

auditory or visual field. This molecular speed is unbearable because it 

indicates a distance, a proximity  where Albertine would like to be, and 

already is.

54

 So that the narrator's pose is not principally that of the investi-

gating detective but (a very different figure) that of the jailer. How can he 

become master of speed, how can he stand it nervously (as a headache) and 

perceptually (as a flash)? How can he build a prison for Albertine? Jealousy 

is different in Swann and the narrator, as is the perception of music: 

Vinteuil gradually ceases to be apprehended in terms of forms and compa-

rable subjects, and assumes incredible speeds and slownesses that combine

 

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on a plane of consistency of variation, the plane of music and of the 
Recherche  (just as Wagnerian motifs abandon all fixity of form and all 

assignation of personages). It is as though Swann's desperate efforts to 

reterritorialize the flow of things (to reterritorialize Odette on a secret, 

painting on a face, music on the Bois de Boulogne) were replaced by the 

sped-up movement of deterritorialization, by a linear speedup of the 

abstract machine, sweeping away faces and landscapes, and then love, jeal-

ousy, painting, and music itself, according to increasingly stronger coeffi-

cients that nourish the Work at risk of dissolving everything and dying. For 

the narrator, despite partial victories, fails in his project; that project was 

not at all to regain time or to force back memories, but to become master of 

speeds to the rhythm of his asthma. It was to face annihilation. But another 

outcome was possible, or was made possible by Proust.

 

Memories of a Molecule. Becoming-animal is only one becoming among 

others. A kind of order or apparent progression can be established for the 

segments of becoming in which we find ourselves; becoming-woman, 

becoming-child; becoming-animal, -vegetable, or -mineral; 

becomings-molecular of all kinds, becomings-particles. Fibers lead us 

from one to the other, transform one into the other as they pass through 

doors and across thresholds. Singing or composing, painting, writing have 

no other aim: to unleash these becomings. Especially music; music is 

traversed by a becoming-woman, becoming-child, and not only at the level 

of themes and motifs: the little refrain, children's games and dances, 

childhood scenes. Instrumentation and orchestration are permeated by 

becomings-animal, above all becomings-bird, but many others besides. The 

lapping, wailing of molecular discordances have always been present, 

even if instrumental evolution with other factors is now giving them 

growing importance, as the value of a new threshold for a properly 

musical content: the sound molecule, relations of speed and slowness 

between particles. Becomings-animal plunge into becomings-molecular. 

This raises all kinds of questions.

 

In a way, we must start at the end: all becomings are already molecular. 

That is because becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or 

someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. Neither of these two fig-

ures of analogy is applicable to becoming: neither the imitation of a subject 

nor the proportionality of a form. Starting from the forms one has, the sub-

ject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to 

extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement 

and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and 

through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the 

process of desire. This principle of proximity or approximation is entirely 

particular and reintroduces no analogy whatsoever. It indicates as rigor-

 

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ously as possible a zone ofproximity

55

 or copresence of a particle, the move-

ment into which any particle that enters the zone is drawn. Louis Wolfson 

embarks upon a strange undertaking: a schizophrenic, he translates as 

quickly as possible each phrase in his maternal language into foreign words 

with similar sound and meaning; an anorexic, he rushes to the refrigerator, 

tears open the packages and snatches their contents, stuffing himself as 

quickly as possible.

56

 It would be false to believe that he needs to borrow 

"disguised" words from foreign languages. Rather, he snatches from his 

own language verbal particles that can no longer belong to the form of that 

language, just as he snatches from food alimentary particles that no longer 

act as formed nutritional substances; the two kinds of particles enter into 

proximity. We could also put it this way: Becoming is to emit particles that 

take on certain relations of movement and rest because they enter a partic-

ular zone of proximity. Or, it is to emit particles that enter that zone 

because they take on those relations. A haecceity is inseparable from the 

fog and mist that depend on a molecular zone, a corpuscular space. Prox-

imity is a notion, at once topological and quantal, that marks a belonging to 

the same molecule, independently of the subjects considered and the forms 

determined.

 

Scherer and Hocquenghem made this essential point in their reconsid-

eration of the problem of wolf-children. Of course, it is not a question of a 

real production, as if the child "really" became an animal; nor is it a ques-

tion of a resemblance, as if the child imitated animals that really raised it; 

nor is it a question of a symbolic metaphor, as if the autistic child that was 

abandoned or lost merely became the "analogue" of an animal. Scherer 

and Hocquenghem are right to expose this false reasoning, which is based 

on a culturalism or moralism upholding the irreducibility of the human 

order: Because the child has not been transformed into an animal, it must 

only have a metaphorical relation to it, induced by the child's illness or 

rejection. For their own part, they appeal to an objective zone of 

indetermi-nation or uncertainty, "something shared or indiscernible," a 

proximity "that makes it impossible to say where the boundary between 

the human and animal lies," not only in the case of autistic children, but 

for all children; it is as though, independent of the evolution carrying 

them toward adulthood, there were room in the child for other 

becomings, "other contemporaneous possibilities" that are not 

regressions but creative involutions bearing witness to "an inhumanity 
immediately experienced in the body as such," 
unnatural nuptials 

"outside the programmed body." There is a reality of becoming-animal, 

even though one does not in reality become animal. It is useless, then, to 

raise the objection that the dog-child only plays dog within the limits of 

his formal constitution, and does nothing canine that another human 

being could not have done if he or she had so

 

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desired. For what needs to be explained is precisely the fact that all chil-

dren, and even many adults, do it to a greater or lesser degree, and in so 

doing bear witness to an inhuman connivance with the animal, rather than 

an Oedipal symbolic community.

57

 Neither should it be thought that chil-

dren who graze, or eat dirt or raw flesh, are merely getting the vitamins and 

minerals they need. It is a question of composing a body with the animal, a 

body without organs defined by zones of intensity or proximity. Where 

does this objective indetermination or indiscernibility of which Scherer 

and Hocquenghem speak come from?

 

An example: Do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into 

composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted 

from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the rela-

tion of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they 

enter. Clearly, this something else can be quite varied, and be more or less 

directly related to the animal in question: it can be the animal's natural 

food (dirt and worm), or its exterior relations with other animals (you can 

become-dog with cats, or become-monkey with a horse), or an apparatus or 

prosthesis to which a person subjects the animal (muzzle and reindeer, 

etc.), or something that does not even have a localizable relation to the ani-

mal in question. For this last case, we have seen how Slepian bases his 

attempt to become-dog on the idea of tying shoes to his hands using his 

mouth-muzzle. Philippe Gavi cites the performances of Lolito, an eater of 

bottles, earthenware, porcelains, iron, and even bicycles, who declares: "I 

consider myself half-animal, half-man. More animal than man. I love ani-

mals, dogs especially, I feel a bond with them. My teeth have adapted; in 

fact, when I don't eat glass or iron, my jaw aches like a young dog's that 

craves to chew a bone."

58

 If we interpret the word "like" as a metaphor, or 

propose a structural analogy of relations (man-iron = dog-bone), we under-

stand nothing of becoming. The word "like" is one of those words that 

change drastically in meaning and function when they are used in connec-

tion with haecceities, when they are made into expressions of becomings 

instead of signified states or signifying relations. A dog may exercise its jaw 

on iron, but when it does it is using its jaw as a molar organ. When Lolito 

eats iron, it is totally different: he makes his jaw enter into composition 

with the iron in such a way that he himself becomes the jaw of a molecular 

dog. The actor Robert De Niro walks "like" a crab in a certain film 

sequence; but, he says, it is not a question of his imitating a crab; it is a ques-

tion of making something that has to do with the crab enter into composi-

tion with the image, with the speed of the image.

59

 That is the essential 

point for us: you become-animal only if, by whatever means or elements, 

you emit corpuscles that enter the relation of movement and rest of the ani-

mal particles, or what amounts to the same thing, that enter the zone of

 

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proximity of the animal molecule. You become animal only molecularly. 

You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with 

enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molec-

ular dog. Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed molar 

species; the vampire and werewolf are becomings of man, in other words, 

proximities between molecules in composition, relations of movement 

and rest, speed and slowness between emitted particles. Of course there are 

werewolves and vampires, we say this with all our heart; but do not look for 

a resemblance or analogy to the animal, for this is becoming-animal in 

action, the production of the molecular animal (whereas the "real" animal 

is trapped in its molar form and subjectivity). It is within us that the animal 

bares its teeth like Hofmannsthal's rat, or the flower opens its petals; but 

this is done by corpuscular emission, by molecular proximity, and not by 

the imitation of a subject or a proportionality of form. Albertine can always 

imitate a flower, but it is when she is sleeping and enters into composition 

with the particles of sleep that her beauty spot and the texture of her skin 

enter a relation of rest and movement that place her in the zone of a molec-

ular vegetable: the becoming-plant of Albertine. And it is when she is held 

prisoner that she emits the particles of a bird. And it is when she flees, 

launches down a line of flight, that she becomes-horse, even if it is the horse 

of death.

 

Yes, all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower, or stone one 

becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, 

objects, or form that we know from the outside and recognize from experi-

ence, through science, or by habit. If this is true, then we must say the same 

of things human: there is a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, that do 

not resemble the woman or the child as clearly distinct molar entities (al-

though it is possible—only possible—for the woman or child to occupy 

privileged positions in relation to these becomings). What we term a molar 

entity is, for example, the woman as defined by her form, endowed with 

organs and functions and assigned as a subject. Becoming-woman is not 

imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it. We are not, how-

ever, overlooking the importance of imitation, or moments of imitation, 

among certain homosexual males, much less the prodigious attempt at a 

real transformation on the part of certain transvestites. All we are saying is 

that these indissociable aspects of becoming-woman must first be under-

stood as a function of something else: not imitating or assuming the female 

form, but emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, 

or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words, that produce 

in us a molecular woman, create the molecular woman. We do not mean to 

say that a creation of this kind is the prerogative of the man, but on the con-

trary that the woman as a molar entity has to become-woman in order that

 

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the man also becomes- or can become-woman. It is, of course, indispensa-

ble for women to conduct a molar politics, with a view to winning back 

their own organism, their own history, their own subjectivity: "we as 

women .. ." makes its appearance as a subject of enunciation. But it is dan-

gerous to confine oneself to such a subject, which does not function with-

out drying up a spring or stopping a flow. The song of life is often intoned 

by the driest of women, moved by ressentiment, the will to power and cold 

mothering. Just as a dessicated child makes a much better child, there 

being no childhood flow emanating from it any longer. It is no more ade-

quate to say that each sex contains the other and must develop the opposite 

pole in itself. Bisexuality is no better a concept than the separateness of the 

sexes. It is as deplorable to miniaturize, internalize the binary machine as 

it is to exacerbate it; it does not extricate us from it. It is thus necessary to 

conceive of a molecular women's politics that slips into molar confronta-

tions, and passes under or through them.

 

When Virginia Woolf was questioned about a specifically women's writ-

ing, she was appalled at the idea of writing "as a woman." Rather, writing 

should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of 

crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating 

men, of sweeping them up in that becoming. Very soft particles—but also 

very hard and obstinate, irreducible, indomitable. The rise of women in 

English novel writing has spared no man: even those who pass for the most 

virile, the most phallocratic, such as Lawrence and Miller, in their turn 

continually tap into and emit particles that enter the proximity or zone of 

indiscernibility of women. In writing, they become-women. The question 

is not, or not only, that of the organism, history, and subject of enunciation 

that oppose masculine to feminine in the great dualism machines. The 

question is fundamentally that of the body—the body they steal from us in 

order to fabricate opposable organisms. This body is stolen first from the 

girl: Stop behaving like that, you're not a little girl anymore, you're not a 

tomboy, etc. The girl's becoming is stolen first, in order to impose a history, 

or prehistory, upon her. The boy's turn comes next, but it is by using the girl 

as an example, by pointing to the girl as the object of his desire, that an 

opposed organism, a dominant history is fabricated for him too. The girl is 

the first victim, but she must also serve as an example and a trap. That is 

why, conversely, the reconstruction of the body as a Body without Organs, 

the anorganism of the body, is inseparable from a becoming-woman, or the 

production of a molecular woman. Doubtless, the girl becomes a woman in 

the molar or organic sense. But conversely, becoming-woman or the molec-

ular woman is the girl herself. The girl is certainly not defined by virginity; 

she is defined by a relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness, by a 

combination of atoms, an emission of particles: haecceity. She never ceases

 

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to roam upon a body without organs. She is an abstract line, or a line of 

flight. Thus girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they 

slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce molec-

ular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross 

right through. The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to 

pass between, the intermezzo—that is what Virginia Woolf lived with all 

her energies, in all of her work, never ceasing to become. The girl is like the 

block of becoming that remains contemporaneous to each opposable term, 

man, woman, child, adult. It is not the girl who becomes a woman; it is 

becoming-woman that produces the universal girl. Trost, a mysterious 

author, painted a portrait of the girl, to whom he linked the fate of the revo-

lution: her speed, her freely machinic body, her intensities, her abstract 

line or line of flight, her molecular production, her indifference to mem-

ory, her nonfigurative character—"the nonfigurative of desire."

60

 Joan of 

Arc? The special role of the girl in Russian terrorism: the girl with the 

bomb, guardian of dynamite? It is certain that molecular politics proceeds 

via the girl and the child. But it is also certain that girls and children draw 

their strength neither from the molar status that subdues them nor from 

the organism and subjectivity they receive; they draw their strength from 

the becoming-molecular they cause to pass between sexes and ages, the 

becoming-child of the adult as well as of the child, the becoming-woman of 

the man as well as of the woman. The girl and the child do not become; it is 

becoming itself that is a child or a girl. The child does not become an adult 

any more than the girl becomes a woman; the girl is the becoming-woman 

of each sex, just as the child is the becoming-young of every age. Knowing 

how to age does not mean remaining young; it means extracting from one's 

age the particles, the speeds and slownesses, the flows that constitute the 

youth of that age. Knowing how to love does not mean remaining a man or a 

woman; it means extracting from one's sex the particles, the speeds and 

slownesses, the flows, the sexes that constitute the girl of that sexuality. It 

is Age itself that is a becoming-child, just as Sexuality, any sexuality, is a 

becoming-woman, in other words, a girl. This by way of response to the stu-

pid question, Why did Proust make Albert Albertine?

 

Although all becomings are already molecular, including 

becoming-woman, it must be said that all becomings begin with and pass 

through becoming-woman. It is the key to all the other becomings. When 

the man of war disguises himself as a woman, flees disguised as a girl, hides 

as a girl, it is not a shameful, transitory incident in his life. To hide, to 

camouflage oneself, is a warrior function, and the line of flight attracts the 

enemy, traverses something and puts what it traverses to flight; the 

warrior arises in the infinity of a line of flight. Although the femininity of 

the man of war is not accidental, it should not be thought of as structural, 

or regulated by a

 

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correspondence of relations. It is difficult to see how the correspondence 

between the two relations "man-war" and "woman-marriage" could entail 

an equivalence between the warrior and the girl as a woman who refuses to 

marry.

61

 It is just as difficult to see how the general bisexuality, or even 

homosexuality, of military societies could explain this phenomenon, 

which is no more imitative than it is structural, representing instead an 

essential anomie of the man of war. This phenomenon can only be under-

stood in terms of becoming. We have seen how the man of war, by virtue of 
his furor and celerity, was swept up in irresistible becomings-animal. These 

are becomings that have as their necessary condition the becoming-woman 

of the warrior, or his alliance with the girl, his contagion with her. The man 

of war is inseparable from the Amazons. The union of the girl and the man 

of war does not produce animals, but simultaneously produces the 

becoming-woman of the latter and the becoming-animal of the former, in a 

single "block" in which the warrior in turn becomes animal by contagion 

with the girl at the same time as the girl becomes warrior by contagion with 

the animal. Everything ties together in an asymmetrical block of becom-

ing, an instantaneous zigzag. It is in the vestiges of a double war machine— 

that of the Greeks, soon to be supplanted by the State, and that of the 

Amazons, soon to be dissolved—that Achilles and Penthesilea, the last 

man of war and the last queen of the girls, choose one another, Achilles in a 

becoming-woman, Penthesilea in a becoming-dog.

 

The rites of transvestism or female impersonation in primitive societies 

in which a man becomes a woman are not explainable by a social organiza-

tion that places the given relations in correspondence, or by a psychic 

organization that makes the woman desire to become a man just as the man 

desires to become a woman.

62

 Social structure and psychic identification 

leave too many special factors unaccounted for: the linkage, unleashing, 

and communication of the becomings triggered by the transvestite; the 

power (puissance) of the resultant becoming-animal; and above all the par-

ticipation of these becomings in a specific war machine. The same applies 

for sexuality: it is badly explained by the binary organization of the sexes, 

and just as badly by a bisexual organization within each sex. Sexuality 

brings into play too great a diversity of conjugated becomings; these are 

like sexes, an entire war machine through which love passes. This is not a 

return to those appalling metaphors of love and war, seduction and con-

quest, the battle of the sexes and the domestic squabble, or even the 

Strindberg-war: it is only after love is done with and sexuality has dried up 

that things appear this way. What counts is that love itself is a war machine 

endowed with strange and somewhat terrifying powers. Sexuality is the 

production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becom-

ings. Sexuality proceeds by way of the becoming-woman of the man and the

 

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becoming-animal of the human: an emission of particles. There is no need 

for bestialism in this, although it may arise, and many psychiatric anec-

dotes document it in ways that are interesting, if oversimplified and conse-

quently off the track, too beastly. It is not a question of "playing" the dog, 

like an elderly gentleman on a postcard; it is not so much a question of mak-

ing love with animals. Becomings-animal are basically of another power, 

since their reality resides not in an animal one imitates or to which one cor-

responds but in themselves, in that which suddenly sweeps us up and 

makes us become—a proximity, an indiscernibility that extracts a shared 

element from the animal far more effectively than any domestication, uti-

lization, or imitation could: "the Beast."

 

If becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular segment, with 

the becomings-animal that link up with it coming next, what are they all 

rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-imperceptible. The 

imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula. For 

example, Matheson's Shrinking Man passes through the kingdoms of 

nature, slips between molecules, to become an unfindable particle in infi-

nite meditation on the infinite. Paul Morand's Monsieur Zero flees the 

larger countries, crosses the smallest ones, descends the scale of States, 

establishes an anonymous society in Lichtenstein of which he is the only 

member, and dies imperceptible, forming the particle 0 with his fingers: "I 

am a man who flees by swimming under water, and at whom all the world's 

rifles fire. ... I must no longer offer a target." But what does 

becoming-imperceptible signify, coming at the end of all the molecular 

becomings that begin with becoming-woman? Becoming-imperceptible 

means many things. What is the relation between the (anorganic) 

imperceptible, the (asignifying) indiscernible, and the (asubjective) 

impersonal?

 

A first response would be: to be like everybody else. That is what 

Kierkegaard relates in his story about the "knight of the faith," the man of 

becoming: to look at him, one would notice nothing, a bourgeois, nothing 

but a bourgeois. That is how Fitzgerald lived: after a real rupture, one suc-

ceeds ... in being just like everybody else. To go unnoticed is by no means 

easy. To be a stranger, even to one's doorman or neighbors. If it is so diffi-

cult to be "like" everybody else, it is because it is an affair of becoming. Not 

everybody becomes everybody [and everything: tout le monde—Trans.], 

makes a becoming of everybody/everything. This requires much asceti-

cism, much sobriety, much creative involution: an English elegance, an 

English fabric, blend in with the walls, eliminate the too-perceived, the 

too-much-to-be-perceived. "Eliminate all that is waste, death, and 

superfluity," complaint and grievance, unsatisfied desire, defense or 

pleading, everything that roots each of us (everybody) in ourselves, in our 

molarity. For everybody/everything is the molar aggregate, but becoming 
everybody/

 

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everything is another affair, one that brings into play the cosmos with its 

molecular components. Becoming everybody/everything (tout le monde) is 

to world (faire monde), to make a world (faire un monde). By process of 

elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece 

in a puzzle that is itself abstract. It is by conjugating, by continuing with 

other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first 

one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clan-

destine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, 

that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, 

disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming 

imperceptible. The fish is like the Chinese poet: not imitative or structural, 

but cosmic. Francois Cheng shows that poets do not pursue resemblance, 

any more than they calculate "geometric proportions." They retain, extract 

only the essential lines and movements of nature; they proceed only by 

continued or superposed "traits," or strokes.

63

 It is in this sense that 

becoming-everybody/everything, making the world a becoming, is to 

world, to make a world or worlds, in other words, to find one's proximities 

and zones of indiscernibility. The Cosmos as an abstract machine, and 

each world as an assemblage effectuating it. If one reduces oneself to one or 

several abstract lines that will prolong itself in and conjugate with others, 

producing immediately, directly a  world in which it is the  world that 

becomes, then one becomes-everybody/everything. Kerouac's dream, and 

already Virginia Woolf s, was for the writing to be like the line of a Chinese 

poem-drawing. She says that it is necessary to "saturate every atom," and 

to do that it is necessary to eliminate, to eliminate all that is resemblance 

and analogy, but also "to put everything into it": eliminate everything that 

exceeds the moment, but put in everything that it includes—and the 

moment is not the instantaneous, it is the haecceity into which one slips 

and that slips into other haecceities by transparency.

64

 To be present at the 

dawn of the world. Such is the link between imperceptibility, indis-

cernibility, and impersonality—the three virtues. To reduce oneself to an 

abstract line, a trait, in order to find one's zone of indiscernibility with 

other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the 

creator. One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/ 

everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily commu-

nicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that 

prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of 

things. One has combined "everything" (le "tout"): the indefinite article, 

the infinitive-becoming, and the proper name to which one is reduced. Sat-

urate, eliminate, put everything in.

 

Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it is by nature 

imperceptible. Perception can grasp movement only as the displacement

 

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of a moving body or the development of a form. Movements, becomings, in 

other words, pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are below 

and above the threshold of perception. Doubtless, thresholds of perception 

are relative; there is always a threshold capable of grasping what eludes 

another: the eagle's eye... But the adequate threshold can in turn operate 

only as a function of a perceptible form and a perceived, discerned subject. 

So that movement in itself continues to occur elsewhere: if we serialize per-

ception, the movement always takes place above the maximum threshold 

and below the minimum threshold, in expanding or contracting intervals 

(microintervals). Like huge Japanese wrestlers whose advance is too slow 

and whose holds are too fast to see, so that what embraces are less the 

wrestlers than the infinite slowness of the wait (what is going to happen?) 

and the infinite speed of the result (what happened?). What we must do is 

reach the photographic or cinematic threshold; but in relation to the 

photograph, movement and affect once again took refuge above and below. 

When Kierkegaard adopts the marvelous motto, "I look only at the move-

ments,"

65

 he is acting astonishingly like a precursor of the cinema, multi-

plying versions of a love scenario (between Agnes and the merman) 

according to variable speeds and slownesses. He has all the more reason to 

say that there is no movement that is not infinite; that the movement of the 

infinite can occur only by means of affect, passion, love, in a becoming that 

is the girl, but without reference to any kind of "mediation"; and that this 

movement as such eludes any mediating perception because it is already 

effectuated at every moment, and the dancer or lover finds him- or herself 

already "awake and walking" the second he or she falls down, and even the 

instant he or she leaps.

66

 Movement, like the girl as a fugitive being, cannot 

be perceived.

 

However, we are obliged to make an immediate correction: movement 

also "must" be perceived, it cannot but be perceived, the imperceptible is 

also the percipiendum. There is no contradiction in this. If movement is 

imperceptible by nature, it is so always in relation to a given threshold of 

perception, which is by nature relative and thus plays the role of a media-

tion on the plane that effects the distribution of thresholds and percepts 

and makes forms perceivable to perceiving subjects. It is the plane of 

organization and development, the plane of transcendence, that renders 

perceptible without itself being perceived, without being capable of being 

perceived. But on the other plane, the plane of immanence or consistency, 

the principle of composition itself must be perceived, cannot but be per-

ceived at the same time as that which it composes or renders. In this case, 

movement is no longer tied to the mediation of a relative threshold that it 

eludes ad infinitum; it has reached, regardless of its speed or slowness, an 

absolute but differentiated threshold that is one with the construction of

 

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this or that region of the continued plane. It could also be said that move-

ment ceases to be the procedure of an always relative deterritorialization, 

becoming the process of absolute deterritorialization. The difference 

between the two planes accounts for the fact that what cannot be perceived 

on one cannot but be perceived on the other. It is in jumping from one plane 

to the other, or from the relative thresholds to the absolute threshold that 

coexists with them, that the imperceptible becomes necessarily perceived. 

Kierkegaard shows that the plane of the infinite, which he calls the plane of 

faith, must become a pure plane of immanence that continually and imme-

diately imparts, reimparts, and regathers the finite: unlike the man of infi-

nite resignation, the knight of the faith or man of becoming will get the girl, 

he will have all of the finite and perceive the imperceptible, as "heir appar-

ent to the finite."

67

 Perception will no longer reside in the relation between a 

subject and an object, but rather in the movement serving as the limit of 

that relation, in the period associated with the subject and object. Percep-

tion will confront its own limit; it will be in the midst of things, throughout 

its own proximity, as the presence of one haecceity in another, the 

prehension of one by the other or the passage from one to the other: Look 

only at the movements.

 

It is odd that the word "faith" should be used to designate a plane that 

works by immanence. But if the knight is the man of becoming, then there 

are all kinds of knights. Are there not even knights of narcotics, in the sense 

that faith is a drug (in a way very different from the sense in which religion 

is an opiate)? These knights claim that drugs, under necessary conditions 

of caution and experimentation, are inseparable from the deployment of a 

plane. And on this plane not only are becomings-woman, 

becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, becomings-imperceptible 

conjugated, but the imperceptible itself becomes necessarily perceived at 

the same time as perception becomes necessarily molecular: arrive at 

holes, microintervals between matters, colors and sounds engulfing lines 

of flight, world lines, lines of transparency and intersection.

68

  Change 

perception; the problem has been formulated correctly because it presents 

"drugs" as a pregnant whole free of secondary distinctions (hallucinatory 

or nonhallucinatory, hard or soft, etc.). All drugs fundamentally concern 

speeds, and modifications of speed. What allows us to describe an overall 

Drug assemblage in spite of the differences between drugs is a line of 

perceptive causality that makes it so that (1) the imperceptible is perceived; 

(2) perception is molecular; (3) desire directly invests the perception and 

the perceived. The Americans of the beat generation had already 

embarked on this path, and spoke of a molecular revolution specific to 

drugs. Then came Castaneda's broad synthesis. Leslie Fiedler set forth the 

poles of the American Dream: cornered between two nightmares, the 

genocide of the Indians and the slav-

 

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ery of the blacks, Americans constructed a psychically repressed image of 

the black as the force of affect, of the multiplication of affects, but a socially 

repressed image of the Indian as subtlety of perception, perception made 

increasingly keen and more finely divided, infinitely slowed or acceler-

ated.

69

 In Europe, Henri Michaux tended to be more willing to free himself 

of rites and civilizations, establishing admirable and minute protocols of 

experience, doing away with the question of causality with respect to drugs, 

delimiting drugs as well as possible, separating them from delirium and 

hallucination. But at this point everything reconnects: again, the problem 

is well formulated if we say that drugs eliminate forms and persons, if we 

bring into play the mad speeds of drugs and the extraordinary posthigh 

slownesses, if we clasp one to the other like wrestlers, if we confer upon per-

ception the molecular power to grasp microperceptions, microoperations, 

and upon the perceived the force to emit accelerated or decelerated parti-

cles in a floating time that is no longer our time, and to emit haecceities that 

are no longer of this world: deterritorialization, "I was disoriented . . ." (a 

perception of things, thoughts, desires in which desire, thought, and the 

thing have invaded all of perception: the imperceptible finally perceived). 

Nothing left but the world of speeds and slownesses without form, without 

subject, without a face. Nothing left but the zigzag of a line, like "the lash of 

the whip of an enraged cart driver" shredding faces and landscapes.

70

 A 

whole rhizomatic labor of perception, the moment when desire and per-

ception meld.

 

This problem of specific causality is an important one. Invoking causali-

ties that are too general or are extrinsic (psychological or sociological) is as 

good as saying nothing. There is a discourse on drugs current today that 

does no more than dredge up generalities on pleasure and misfortune, on 

difficulties in communication, on causes that always come from some-

where else. The more incapable people are of grasping a specific causality 

in extension, the more they pretend to understand the phenomenon in 

question. There is no doubt that an assemblage never contains a causal 

infrastructure. It does have, however, and to the highest degree, an abstract 

line of creative or specific causality, its line of flight or of deterritorializa-
tion; 
this line can be effectuated only in connection with general causalities 

of another nature, but is in no way explained by them. It is our belief that 

the issue of drugs can be understood only at the level where desire directly 

invests perception, and perception becomes molecular at the same time as 

the imperceptible is perceived. Drugs then appear as the agent of this 

becoming. This is where pharmacoanalysis would come in, which must be 

both compared and contrasted to psychoanalysis. For psychoanalysis must 

be taken simultaneously as a model, a contrasting approach, and a betrayal. 

Psychoanalysis can be taken as a model of reference because it was able,

 

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with respect to essentially affective phenomena, to construct the schema of 

a specific causality divorced from ordinary social or psychological general-

ities. But this schema still relies on a plane of organization that can never be 

apprehended in itself, that is always concluded from something else, that is 

always inferred, concealed from the system of perception: it is called the 

Unconscious. Thus the plane of the Unconscious remains a plane of tran-

scendence guaranteeing, justifying, the existence of psychoanalysis and the 

necessity of its interpretations. This plane of the Unconscious stands in 

molar opposition to the perception-consciousness system, and because 

desire must be translated  onto this plane, it is itself linked to gross 

molarities, like the submerged part of an iceberg (the Oedipal structure, or 

the rock of castration). The imperceptible thus remains all the more imper-

ceptible because it is opposed to the perceived in a dualism machine. 

Everything is different on the plane of consistency or immanence, which is 

necessarily perceived in its own right in the course of its construction: 

experimentation replaces interpretation, now molecular, nonfigurative, 

and nonsymbolic, the unconscious as such is given in microperceptions; 

desire directly invests the field of perception, where the imperceptible 

appears as the perceived object of desire itself, "the nonfigurative of 

desire." The unconscious no longer designates the hidden principle of the 

transcendent plane of organization, but the process of the immanent plane 

of consistency as it appears on itself in the course of its construction. For 

the unconscious must be constructed, not rediscovered. There is no longer 

a conscious-unconscious dualism machine, because the unconscious is, or 

rather is produced, there where consciousness goes, carried by the plane.

71 

Drugs give the unconscious the immanence and plane that psychoanalysis 

has consistently botched (perhaps the famous cocaine episode marked a 

turning point that forced Freud to renounce a direct approach to the 

unconscious).

 

But if it is true that drugs are linked to this immanent, molecular percep-

tive causality, we are still faced with the question of whether they actually 

succeed in drawing the plane necessary for their action. The causal line, or 

the line of flight, of drugs is constantly being segmentarized under the most 

rigid of forms, that of dependency, the hit and the dose, the dealer. Even in 

its supple form, it can mobilize gradients and thresholds of perception 

toward becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, but even this is done in 

the context of a relativity of thresholds that restrict themselves to imitating 

a plane of consistency rather than drawing it on an absolute threshold. 

What good does it do to perceive as fast as a quick-flying bird if speed and 

movement continue to escape somewhere else? The deterritorializations 

remain relative, compensated for by the most abject reterritorializations, 

so that the imperceptible and perception continually pursue or run after

 

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each other without ever truly coupling. Instead of holes in the world allow-

ing the world lines themselves to run off, the lines of flight coil and start to 

swirl in black holes; to each addict a hole, group or individual, like a snail. 

Down, instead of high. The molecular microperceptions are overlaid in 

advance, depending on the drug, by hallucinations, delusions, false percep-

tions, phantasies, or paranoid outbursts; they restore forms and subjects 

every instant, like so many phantoms or doubles continually blocking con-

struction of the plane. Moreover, as we saw in our enumeration of the dan-

gers, not only is the plane of consistency in danger of being betrayed or 

thrown offtrack through the influence of other causalities that intervene in 

an assemblage of this kind, but the plane itself engenders dangers of its 

own, by which it is dismantled at the same time as it is constructed. We are 

no longer, it itself is no longer master of speeds. Instead of making a body 

without organs sufficiently rich or full for the passage of intensities, drug 

addicts erect a vitrified or emptied body, or a cancerous one: the causal 

line, creative line, or line of flight immediately turns into a line of death 

and abolition. The abominable vitrification of the veins, or the purulence 

of the nose—the glassy body of the addict. Black holes and lines of death, 

Artaud's and Michaux's warnings converge (they are more technical, more 

consistent than the informational, psychoanalytic, or sociopsychological 

discourse of treatment and assistance centers). Artaud: You will not avoid 

hallucinations, erroneous perceptions, shameless phantasies, or bad feel-

ings, like so many black holes on the plane of consistency, because your 

conscious will also go in that booby-trapped direction.

72

 Michaux: You will 

no longer be master of your speeds, you will get stuck in a mad race between 

the imperceptible and perception, a race all the more circular now that 

everything is relative.

73

 You will be full of yourself, you will lose control, 

you will be on a plane of consistency, in a body without organs, but at a 

place where you will always botch them, empty them, undo what you do, 

motionless rags. These words are so much simpler than "erroneous percep-

tions" (Artaud) or "bad feelings" (Michaux), but say the most technical of 

things: that the immanent molecular and perceptive causality of desire 

fails in the drug-assemblage. Drug addicts continually fall back into what 

they wanted to escape: a segmentarity all the more rigid for being marginal, 

a territorialization all the more artificial for being based on chemical sub-

stances, hallucinatory forms, and phantasy subjectifications. Drug addicts 

may be considered as precursors or experimenters who tirelessly blaze new 

paths of life, but their cautiousness lacks the foundation for caution. So 

they either join the legion of false heroes who follow the conformist path of 

a little death and a long fatigue. Or, what is worse, all they will have done is 

make an attempt only nonusers or former users can resume and benefit 

from, secondarily rectifying the always aborted plane of drugs, discovering

 

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through drugs what drugs lack for the construction of a plane of consis-

tency. Is the mistake drug users make always to start over again from 

ground zero, either going on the drug again or quitting, when what they 

should do is make it a stopover, to start from the "middle," bifurcate from 

the middle? To succeed in getting drunk, but on pure water (Henry Miller). 

To succeed in getting high, but by abstention, "to take and abstain, espe-

cially abstain," I am a drinker of water (Michaux). To reach the point where 

"to get high or not to get high" is no longer the question, but rather whether 

drugs have sufficiently changed the general conditions of space and time 

perception so that nonusers can succeed in passing through the holes in the 

world and following the lines of flight at the very place where means other 

than drugs become necessary. Drugs do not guarantee immanence; rather, 

the immanence of drugs allows one to forgo them. Is it cowardice or exploi-

tation to wait until others have taken the risks? No, it is joining an under-

taking in the middle, while changing the means. It is necessary to choose 

the right molecule, the water, hydrogen, or helium molecule. This has noth-

ing to do with models, all models are molar: it is necessary to determine the 

molecules and particles in relation to which "proximities" 

(indiscern-ibilities, becomings) are engendered and defined. The vital 

assemblage, the life-assemblage, is theoretically or logically possible with 

all kinds of molecules, silicon, for example. But it so happens that this 

assemblage is not machinically possible with silicon: the abstract machine 

does not let it pass because it does not distribute zones of proximity that 

construct the plane of consistency.

74

 We shall see that machinic reasons are 

entirely different from logical reasons or possibilities. One does not 

conform to a model, one straddles the right horse. Drug users have not 

chosen the right molecule or the right horse. Drugs are too unwieldy to 

grasp the imperceptible and becomings-imperceptible; drug users believed 

that drugs would grant them the plane, when in fact the plane must distill 

its own drugs, remaining master of speeds and proximities.

 

Memories of the Secret. The secret has a privileged, but quite variable, 

relation to perception and the imperceptible. The secret relates first of all 

to certain contents. The content is too big for its form ... or else the con-

tents themselves have a form, but that form is covered, doubled, or 

replaced by a simple container, envelope, or box whose role it is to suppress 

formal relations. These are contents it has been judged fitting to isolate or 

disguise for various reasons. Drawing up a list of these reasons (shame, 

treasure, divinity, etc.) has limited value as long as the secret is opposed to 

its discovery as in a binary machine having only two terms, the secret and 

disclosure, the secret and desecration. For on the one hand, the secret as 

content is superseded by a perception of the secret, which is no less secret

 

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than the secret. It matters little what the goal is, and whether the aim of the 

perception is a denunciation, final divulging, or disclosure. From an anec-

dotal standpoint, the perception of the secret is the opposite of the secret, 

but from the standpoint of the concept, it is a part of it. What counts is that 

the perception of the secret must necessarily be secret itself: the spy, the 

voyeur, the blackmailer, the author of anonymous letters are no less secre-

tive than what they are in a position to disclose, regardless of their ulterior 

motives. There is always a woman, a child, a bird to secretly perceive the 

secret. There is always a perception finer than yours, a perception of your 

imperceptible, of what is in your box. We can even envision a profession of 

secrecy for those who are in a position to perceive the secret. The protector 

of the secret is not necessarily in on it, but is also tied to a perception, since 

he or she must perceive and detect those who wish to discover the secret 

(counterespionage). There is thus a first direction, in which the secret 

moves toward an equally secretive perception, a perception that seeks to be 

imperceptible itself. A wide variety of very different figures may revolve 

around this first point. And then there is a second point, just as inseparable 

from the secret as its content: the way in which it imposes itself and 

spreads. Once again, whatever the finalities or results, the secret has a way 

of spreading that is in turn shrouded in secrecy. The secret as secretion. The 

secret must sneak, insert, or introduce itself into the arena of public forms; 

it must pressure them and prod known subjects into action (we are refer-

ring to influence of the "lobby" type, even if the lobby is not in itself a secret 

society).

 

In short, the secret, defined as a content that has hidden its form in favor 

of a simple container, is inseparable from two movements that can acci-

dentally interrupt its course or betray it, but are nonetheless an essential 

part of it: something must ooze from the box, something will be perceived 

through the box or in the half-opened box. The secret was invented by soci-

ety; it is a sociological or social notion. Every secret is a collective assem-

blage. The secret is not at all an immobilized or static notion. Only 

becomings are secrets; the secret has a becoming. The secret has its origin 

in the war machine; it is the war machine and its becomings-woman, 

becomings-child, becomings-animal that bring the secret.

75

 A secret soci-

ety always acts in society as a war machine. Sociologists who have studied 

secret societies have determined many of their laws: protection, 

equalization and hierarchy, silence, ritual, deindividuation, centraliza-

tion, autonomy, compartmentalization, etc.

76

 But perhaps they have not 

given enough weight to the principal laws governing the movement of con-

tent: (1) every secret society has a still more secret hindsociety, which either 

perceives the secret, protects it, or metes out the punishment for its disclo-

sure (it is not at all begging the question to define the secret society by the

 

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presence of a secret hindsociety: a society is secret when it exhibits this 

doubling, has this special section); (2) every secret society has its own mode 

of action, which is in turn secret; the secret society may act by influence, 

creeping, insinuation, oozing, pressure, or invisible rays; "passwords" and 

secret languages (there is no contradiction here; the secret society cannot 

live without the universal project of permeating all of society, of creeping 

into all of the forms of society, disrupting its hierarchy and segmentation; 

the secret hierarchy conjugates with a conspiracy of equals, it commands 

its members to swim in society as fish in water, but conversely society must 

be like water around fish; it needs the complicity of the entire surrounding 

society). This is evident in cases as diverse as the mob groups of the United 

States and the animal-men of Africa: on the one hand, there is the mode of 

influence of the secret society and its leaders on the political or public fig-

ures of its surroundings; and on the other hand, there is the secret society's 

mode of doubling itself with a hindsociety, which may constitute a special 

section of killers or guards.

77

 Influence and doubling, secretion and concre-

tion, every secret operates between two "discreets" [discrets: also "discrete 

(terms)"—Trans.] that can, moreover, link or meld in certain cases. The 

child's secret combines these elements to marvelous effect: the secret as a 

content in a box, the secret influence and propagation of the secret, the 

secret perception of the secret (the child's secret is not composed of minia-

turized adult secrets but is necessarily accompanied by a secret perception 

of the adult secret). A child discovers a secret...

 

But the becoming of the secret compels it not to content itself with con-

cealing its form in a simple container, or with swapping it for a container. 

The secret, as secret, must now acquire its own form. The secret is elevated 

from a finite content to the infinite form of secrecy. This is the point at 

which the secret attains absolute imperceptibility, instead of being linked 

to a whole interplay of relative perceptions and reactions. We go from a 

content that is well defined, localized, and belongs to the past, to the a pri-

ori general form of a nonlocalizable something that has happened. We go 

from the secret defined as a hysterical childhood content to secrecy 

defined as an eminently virile paranoid form. And this form displays the 

same two concomitants of the secret, the secret perception and the mode of 

action by secret influence; but these concomitants have become "traits" of 

a form they ceaselessly reconstitute, reform, recharge. On the one hand, 

paranoiacs denounce the international plot of those who steal their secrets, 

their most intimate thoughts; or they declare that they have the gift of per-

ceiving the secrets of others before they have formed (someone with para-

noid jealousy does not apprehend the other in the act of escaping; they 

divine or foresee the slightest intention of it). On the other hand, paranoi-

acs act by means of, or else suffer from, rays they emit or receive (Raymond

 

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Roussel and Schreber). Influence by rays, and doubling by flight or echo, 

are what now give the secret its infinite form, in which perceptions as well 

as actions pass into imperceptibility. Paranoid judgment is like an antici-

pation of perception replacing empirical research into boxes and their con-

tents: guilty a priori, and in any event! (for example, the evolution of the 

narrator of the Recherche in relation to Albertine). We can say, in summary 

fashion, that psychoanalysis has gone from a hysterical to an increasingly 

paranoid conception of the secret.

78

 Interminable analysis: the Uncon-

scious has been assigned the increasingly difficult task of itself being the 

infinite form of secrecy, instead of a simple box containing secrets. You will 

tell all, but in saying everything you will say nothing because all the "art" of 

psychoanalysis is required in order to measure your contents against the 

pure form. At this point, however, after the secret has been raised to the 

level of a form in this way, an inevitable adventure befalls it. When the 

question "What happened?" attains this infinite virile form, the answer is 

necessarily that nothing happened, and both form and content are 

destroyed. The news travels fast that the secret of men is nothing, in truth 

nothing at all. Oedipus, the phallus, castration, "the splinter in the flesh"— 

that was the secret? It is enough to make women, children, lunatics, and 

molecules laugh.

 

The more the secret is made into a structuring, organizing form, the 

thinner and more ubiquitous it becomes, the more its content becomes 

molecular, at the same time as its form dissolves. It really wasn't much, as 

Jocasta says. The secret does not as a result disappear, but it does take on a 

more feminine status. What was behind President Schreber's paranoid 

secret all along, if not a becoming-feminine, a becoming-woman? For 

women do not handle the secret in at all the same way as men (except when 

they reconstitute an inverted image of virile secrecy, a kind of secrecy of the 

gyneceum). Men alternately fault them for their indiscretion, their gossip-

ing, and for their solidarity, their betrayal. Yet it is curious how a woman 

can be secretive while at the same time hiding nothing, by virtue of trans-

parency, innocence, and speed. The complex assemblage of secrecy in 

courtly love is properly feminine and operates in the most complete trans-

parency. Celerity against gravity. The celerity of a war machine against the 

gravity of a State apparatus. Men adopt a grave attitude, knights of the 

secret: "You see what burden I bear: my seriousness, my discretion." But 

they end up telling everything—and it turns out to be nothing. There are 

women, on the other hand, who tell everything, sometimes in appalling 

technical detail, but one knows no more at the end than at the beginning; 

they have hidden everything by celerity, by limpidity. They have no secret 

because they have become a secret themselves. Are they more politic than 

we? Iphigenia. Innocent a priori. That is the girl's defense against the

 

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judgment preferred by men: "guilty a priori" ... This is where the secret 
reaches its ultimate state: its content is molecularized, it has become 
molecular, at the same time as its form has been dismantled, becoming a 
pure moving line—in the sense in which it can be said a given line is the 
"secret" of a painter, or a given rhythmic cell, a given sound molecule 
(which does not constitute a theme or form) the "secret" of a musician.

 

If ever there was a writer who dealt with the secret, it was Henry James. 

In this respect, he went through an entire evolution, like a perfecting of his 
art. For he began by looking for the secret in contents, even insignificant, 
half-opened ones, contents briefly glimpsed. Then he raised the possibility 
of there being an infinite form of secrecy that no longer even requires a con-
tent and that has conquered the imperceptible. But he raises this possi-
bility only in order to ask the question, Is the secret in the content or in the 
form? And the answer is already apparent: neither.

19

 James is one of those 

writers who is swept up in an irresistible becoming-woman. He never 
stopped pursuing his goal, inventing the necessary technical means. 
Mo-lecularize the content of the secret and linearize its form. James 
explored it all, from the becoming-child of the secret (there is always a 
child who discovers secrets: What Maisie Knew) to the becoming-woman 
of the secret (secrecy by a transparency that is no longer anything more 
than a pure line that scarcely leaves any traces of its own passage; the 
admirable Daisy Miller). James is not as close to Proust as people say; it is 
he who raises the cry, "Innocent a priori!" (all Daisy asked for was a little 
respect, she would have given her love for that. . .) in opposition to the 
"Guilty a priori" that condemns Albertine. What counts in the secret is 
less its three states (child's content, virile infinite form, pure feminine 
line) than the becomings attached to them, the becoming-child of the 
secret, its becoming-feminine, its becoming-molecular—which occur 
precisely at the point where the secret has lost both its content and its form, 
where the imperceptible, the clandestine with nothing left to hide, has 
finally been perceived. From the gray eminence to the gray immanence. 
Oedipus passes through all three secrets: the secret of the sphinx whose 
box he penetrates; the secret that weighs upon him as the infinite form of 
his own guilt; and finally, the secret at Colonus that makes him inaccessible 
and melds with the pure line of his flight and exile, he who has nothing 
left to hide, or, like an old No actor, has only a girl's mask with which to 
cover his lack of a face. Some people can talk, hide nothing, not lie: they 
are secret by transparency, as impenetrable as water, in truth 
incomprehensible. Whereas the others have a secret that is always 
breached, even though they surround it with a thick wall or elevate it to an 
infinite form.

 

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Memories and Becomings, Points and Blocks. Why are there so many 

becomings of man, but no becoming-man? First because man is 

major-itarian par excellence, whereas becomings are minoritarian; all 

becoming is a becoming-minoritarian. When we say majority, we are 

referring not to a greater relative quantity but to the determination of a 

state or standard in relation to which larger quantities, as well as the 

smallest, can be said to be minoritarian: white-man, adult-male, etc. 

Majority implies a state of domination, not the reverse. It is not a question 

of knowing whether there are more mosquitoes or flies than men, but of 

knowing how "man" constituted a standard in the universe in relation to 

which men necessarily (analytically) form a majority. The majority in a 

government presupposes the right to vote, and not only is established 

among those who possess that right but is exercised over those who do 

not, however great their numbers; similarly, the majority in the universe 

assumes as pregiven the right and power of man.

80

 In this sense women, 

children, but also animals, plants, and molecules, are minoritarian. It is 

perhaps the special situation of women in relation to the man-standard 

that accounts for the fact that becomings, being minoritarian, always pass 

through a becoming-woman. It is important not to confuse "minoritarian," 

as a becoming or process, with a "minority", as an aggregate or a state. 

Jews, Gypsies, etc., may constitute minorities under certain conditions, 

but that in itself does not make them becomings. One reterritorializes, or 

allows oneself to be reterritorialized, on a minority as a state; but in a 

becoming, one is deterritorialized. Even blacks, as the Black Panthers 

said, must become-black. Even women must become-woman. Even Jews 

must become-Jewish (it certainly takes more than a state). But if this is 

the case, then becoming-Jewish necessarily affects the non-Jew as much 

as the Jew. Becoming-woman necessary affects men as much as women. In 

a way, the subject in a becoming is always "man," but only when he 

enters a becoming-minoritarian that rends him from his major identity. 

As in Arthur Miller's novel, Focus,  or Losey's film, Mr. Klein: it is the 

non-Jew who becomes Jewish, who is swept up in, carried off by, this 

becoming after being rent from his standard of measure. Conversely, if 

Jews themselves must become-Jewish, if women must become-woman, if 

children must become-child, if blacks must become-black, it is because 

only a minority is capable of serving as the active medium of becoming, 

but under such conditions that it ceases to be a definable aggregate in 

relation to the majority. Becoming-Jewish, becoming-woman, etc., 

therefore imply two simultaneous movements, one by which a term (the 

subject) is withdrawn from the majority, and another by which a term 

(the medium or agent) rises up from the minority. There is an 

asymmetrical and indissociable block of becoming, a block of alliance: the 

two "Mr. Kleins,"

 

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the Jew and the non-Jew, enter into a becoming-Jewish (the same thing 

happens in Focus).

 

A woman has to become-woman, but in a becoming-woman of all man. 

A Jew becomes Jewish, but in a becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew. A 

becoming-minoritarian exists only by virtue of a deterritorialized medium 

and subject that are like its elements. There is no subject of the becoming 

except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of 

becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority. We can be 

thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most 

insignificant of things. You don't deviate from the majority unless there is 

a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off. It is because the hero of 
Focus, the average American, needs glasses that give his nose a vaguely 

Semitic air, it is "because of the glasses" that he is thrown into this strange 

adventure of the becoming-Jewish of the non-Jew. Anything at all can do 

the job, but it always turns out to be a political affair. Becoming-minori-

tarian is a political affair and necessitates a labor of power {puissance), an 

active micropolitics. This is the opposite of macropolitics, and even of His-

tory, in which it is a question of knowing how to win or obtain a majority. 

As Faulkner said, to avoid ending up a fascist there was no other choice but 

to become-black.

81

 Unlike history, becoming cannot be conceptualized in 

terms of past and future. Becoming-revolutionary remains indifferent to 

questions of a future and a past of the revolution; it passes between the two. 

Every becoming is a block of coexistence. The so-called ahistorical socie-

ties set themselves outside history, not because they are content to repro-

duce immutable models or are governed by a fixed structure, but because 

they are societies of becoming (war societies, secret societies, etc.). There is 

no history but of the majority, or of minorities as defined in relation to the 

majority. And yet "how to win the majority" is a totally secondary problem 

in relation to the advances of the imperceptible.

 

Let us try to say it another way: There is no becoming-man because man 

is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular. The 

faciality function showed us the form under which man constitutes the 

majority, or rather the standard upon which the majority is based: white, 

male, adult, "rational," etc., in short, the average European, the subject of 

enunciation. Following the law of arborescence, it is this central Point that 

moves across all of space or the entire screen, and at every turn nourishes a 

certain distinctive opposition, depending on which faciality trait is 

retained: male-(female), adult-(child), white-(black, yellow, or red); 

rational-(animal). The central point, or third eye, thus has the property of 

organizing binary distributions within the dualism machines, and of 

reproducing itself in the principal term of the opposition; the entire oppo-

sition at the same time resonates in the central point. The constitution of a

 

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"majority" as redundancy. Man constitutes himself as a gigantic memory, 

through the position of the central point, its frequency (insofar as it is nec-

essarily reproduced by each dominant point), and its resonance (insofar as 

all of the points tie in with it). Any line that goes from one point to another 

in the aggregate of the molar system, and is thus defined by points answer-

ing to these mnemonic conditions of frequency and resonance, is a part of 

the arborescent system.

82

 

What constitutes arborescence is the submission of the line to the point. 

Of course, the child, the woman, the black have memories; but the Memory 

that collects those memories is still a virile majoritarian agency treating 

them as "childhood memories," as conjugal, or colonial memories. It is 

possible to operate by establishing a conjunction or collocation of contigu-

ous points rather than a relation between distant points: you would then 

have phantasies rather than memories. For example, a woman can have a 

female point alongside a male point, and a man a male point alongside a 

female one. The constitution of these hybrids, however, does not take us 

very far in the direction of a true becoming (for example, bisexuality, as the 

psychoanalysts note, in no way precludes the prevalence of the masculine 

or the majority of the "phallus"). One does not break with the arborescent 

schema, one does not reach becoming or the molecular, as long as a line is 

connected to two distant points, or is composed of two contiguous points. 

A line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points 

that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between  points, it comes up 

through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived, 

transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points.

83

 A 

point is always a point of origin. But a line of becoming has neither begin-

ning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination; to speak of the 

absence of an origin, to make the absence of an origin the origin, is a bad 

play on words. A line of becoming has only a middle. The middle is not an 

average; it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement. A becoming 

is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is nei-

ther one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border 

or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both. If becoming is a 

block (a line-block), it is because it constitutes a zone of proximity and 

indiscernibility, a no-man's-land, a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up 

the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the 

other—and the border-proximity is indifferent to both contiguity and to 

distance. The line or block of becoming that unites the wasp and the orchid 

produces a shared deterritorialization: of the wasp, in that it becomes a lib-

erated piece of the orchid's reproductive system, but also of the orchid, in 

that it becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp, also liberated from its 

own reproduction. A coexistence of two asymmetrical movements that

 

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combine to form a block, down a line of flight that sweeps away selective 

pressures. The line, or the block, does not link the wasp to the orchid, any 

more than it conjugates or mixes them: it passes between them, carrying 

them away in a shared proximity in which the discernibility of points dis-

appears. The line-system (or block-system) of becoming is opposed to the 

point-system of memory. Becoming is the movement by which the line 

frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible: the rhizome, 

the opposite of arborescence; break away from arborescence. Becoming is 
an antimemory. 
Doubtless, there exists a molecular memory, but as a fac-

tor of integration into a majoritarian or molar system. Memories always 

have a reterritorialization function. On the other hand, a vector of 

deterritorialization is in no way indeterminate; it is directly plugged into 

the molecular levels, and the more deterritorialized it is, the stronger is the 

contact: it is deterritorialization that makes the aggregate of the molecular 

components "hold together." From this point of view, one may contrast a 
childhood block, or a becoming-child, with the childhood memory: "a" 

molecular child is produced. . . "a" child coexists with us, in a zone of prox-

imity or a block of becoming, on a line of deterritorialization that carries us 

both off—as opposed to the child we once were, whom we remember or 

phantasize, the molar child whose future is the adult. "This will be child-

hood, but it must not be my childhood," writes Virginia Woolf. {Orlando 

already does not operate by memories, but by blocks, blocks of ages, block 

of epochs, blocks of the kingdoms of nature, blocks of sexes, forming so 

many becomings between things, or so many lines of deterritoriali-

zation.)

84

 Wherever we used the word "memories" in the preceding pages, 

we were wrong to do so; we meant to say "becoming," we were saying 

becoming.

 

If the line is opposed to the point (or blocks to memories, becoming to 

the faculty of memory), it is not in an absolute way: a punctual system 

includes a certain utilization of lines, and the block itself assigns the point 

new functions. In a punctual system, a point basically refers to linear coor-

dinates. Not only are a horizontal line and a vertical line represented, but 

the vertical moves parallel to itself, and the horizontal superposes other 

horizontals upon itself; every point is assigned in relation to the two base 

coordinates, but is also marked on a horizontal line of superposition and 

on a vertical line or plane of displacement. Finally, two points are con-

nected when any line is drawn from one to the other. A system is termed 
punctual
'when its lines are taken as coordinates in this way, or as localizable 

connections; for example, systems of arborescence, or molar and mne-

monic systems in general, are punctual. Memory has a punctual organiza-

tion because every present refers simultaneously to the horizontal line of 
the flow of time (kinematics), which goes from an old present to the actual

 

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present, and the vertical line of the order of time (stratigraphy), which goes 

from the present to the past, or to the representation of the old present. 

This is, of course, a basic schema that cannot be developed further without 

running into major complications, but it is the one found in representa-

tions of art forming a "didactic" system, in other words, a mnemotechnics. 

Musical representation, on the one hand, draws a horizontal, melodic line, 

the bass line, upon which other melodic lines are superposed; points are 

assigned that enter into relations of counterpoint between lines. On the 

other hand, it draws a vertical, harmonic line or plane, which moves along 

the horizontals but is no longer dependent upon them; it runs from high to 

low and defines a chord capable of linking up with the following chords. 

Pictorial representation has an analogous form, with means of its own: this 

is not only because the painting has a vertical and a horizontal, but because 

the traits and colors, each on its own account, relate to verticals of displace-

ment and horizontals of superposition (for example, the vertical cold form, 

or white, light and tonality; the horizontal warm form, or black, chromatics 

and modality, etc.). To cite only relatively recent examples, this is evident 

in the didactic systems of Kandinsky, Klee, and Mondrian, which neces-

sarily imply an encounter with music.

 

Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a punctual system: (1) 

Systems of this kind comprise two base lines, horizontal and vertical; they 

serve as coordinates for assigning points. (2) The horizontal line can be 

superposed vertically and the vertical line can be moved horizontally, in 

such a way that new points are produced or reproduced, under conditions 

of horizontal frequency and vertical resonance. (3) From one point to 

another, a line can (or cannot) be drawn, but if it can it takes the form of a 

localizable connection; diagonals thus play the role of connectors between 

points of different levels or moments, instituting in their turn frequencies 

and resonances on the basis of these points of variable horizon or verticon, 

contiguous or distant.

85

 These systems are arborescent, mnemonic, molar, 

structural; they are systems of territorialization or reterritorialization. The 

line and the diagonal remain totally subordinated to the point because they 

serve as coordinates for a point or as localizable connections for two 

points, running from one point to another.

 

Opposed to the punctual system are linear, or rather multilinear, sys-

tems. Free the line, free the diagonal: every musician or painter has this 

intention. One elaborates a punctual system or a didactic representation, 

but with the aim of making it snap, of sending a tremor through it. A punc-

tual system is most interesting when there is a musician, painter, writer, 

philosopher to oppose it, who even fabricates it in order to oppose it, like a 

springboard to jump from. History is made only by those who oppose his-

tory (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it). This is

 

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not done for provocation but happens because the punctual system they 

found ready-made, or themselves invented, must have allowed this opera-

tion: free the line and the diagonal, draw the line instead of plotting a point, 

produce an imperceptible diagonal instead of clinging to an even elabo-

rated or reformed vertical or horizontal. When this is done it always goes 

down in History but never comes from it. History may try to break its ties 

to memory; it may make the schemas of memory more elaborate, super-

pose and shift coordinates, emphasize connections, or deepen breaks. The 

dividing line, however, is not there. The dividing line passes not between 

history and memory but between punctual "history-memory" systems and 

diagonal or multilinear assemblages, which are in no way eternal: they have 

to do with becoming; they are a bit of becoming in the pure state; they are 

transhistorical. There is no act of creation that is not transhistorical and 

does not come up from behind or proceed by way of a liberated line. 

Nietzsche opposes history not to the eternal but to the subhistorical or 

superhistorical: the Untimely, which is another name for haecceity, 

becoming, the innocence of becoming (in other words, forgetting as 

opposed to memory, geography as opposed to history, the map as opposed 

to the tracing, the rhizome as opposed to arborescence). "The unhistorical 

is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate and with the 

destruction of which it must vanish. . . . What deed would man be capable 

of if he had not first entered into that vaporous region of the unhis-

torical?"

86

 Creations are like mutant abstract lines that have detached 

themselves from the task of representing a world, precisely because they 

assemble a new type of reality that history can only recontain or relocate in 

punctual systems.

 

When Boulez casts himself in the role of historian of music, he does so in 

order to show how a great musician, in a very different manner in each case, 

invents a kind of diagonal running between the harmonic vertical and the 

melodic horizon. And in each case it is a different diagonal, a different 

technique, a creation. Moving along this transversal line, which is really a 

line of deterritorialization, there is a sound block that no longer has a point 

of origin, since it is always and already in the middle of the line; and no 

longer has horizontal and vertical coordinates, since it creates its own coor-

dinates; and no longer forms a localizable connection from one point to 

another, since it is in "nonpulsed time": a deterritorialized rhythmic block 

that has abandoned points, coordinates, and measure, like a drunken boat 

that melds with the line or draws a plane of consistency. Speeds and 

slownesses inject themselves into musical form, sometimes impelling it to 

proliferation, linear microproliferations, and sometimes to extinction, 

sonorous abolition, involution, or both at once. The musician is in the best 

position to say: "I hate the faculty of memory, I hate memories." And that is

 

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because he or she affirms the power of becoming. The Viennese school is 

exemplary of this kind of diagonal, this kind of line-block. But it can 

equally be said that the Viennese school found a new system of 

territo-rialization, of points, verticals, and horizontals that position it in 

History. Another attempt, another creative act, came after it. The 

important thing is that all musicians have always proceeded in this way: 

drawing their own diagonal, however fragile, outside points, outside 

coordinates and localizable connections, in order to float a sound block 

down a created, liberated line, in order to unleash in space this mobile 

and mutant sound block, a haecceity (for example, chromaticism, 

aggregates, and complex notes, but already the resources and possibilities 

of polyphony, etc.).

87 

Some have spoken of "oblique vectors" with respect 

to the organ. The diagonal is often composed of extremely complex lines 

and spaces of sound. Is that the secret of a little phrase or a rhythmic 

block? Undoubtedly, the point now assumes a new and essential creative 

function. It is no longer simply a question of an inevitable destiny 

reconstituting a punctual system; on the contrary, it is now the point that 

is subordinated to the line, the point now marks the proliferation of the 

line, or its sudden deviation, its acceleration, its slowdown, its furor or 

agony. Mozart's "microblocks." The block may even be reduced to a point, 

as though to a single note (point-block): Berg's B in Wozzeck, Schumann's 

A. Homage to Schumann, the madness of Schumann: the cello wanders 

across the grid of the orchestration, drawing its diagonal, along which the 

deterritorialized sound block moves; or an extremely sober kind of refrain 

is "treated" by a very elaborate melodic line and polyphonic architecture.

 

In a multilinear system, everything happens at once: the line breaks free 

of the point as origin; the diagonal breaks free of the vertical and the hori-

zontal as coordinates; and the transversal breaks free of the diagonal as a 

localizable connection between two points. In short, a block-line passes 

amid (au milieu des) sounds and propels itself by its own nonlocalizable 

middle (milieu). The sound block is the intermezzo. It is a body without 

organs, an antimemory pervading musical organization, and is all the 

more sonorous: "The Schumannian body does not stay in place. ... The 

intermezzo [is] consubstantial with the entire Schumannian oeuvre.... At 

the limit, there are only intermezzi. ... The Schumannian body knows 

only bifurcations; it does not construct itself, it keeps diverging according 

to an accumulation of interludes.... Schumannian beating is panic, but it 

is also coded ... and it is because the panic of the blows apparently keeps 

within the limits of a docile language that it is ordinarily not perceived.. . . 

Let us imagine for tonality two contradictory (and yet concomitant) sta-

tuses. On the one hand ... a screen, a language intended to articulate the 

body.. .according to a known organization... .On the other hand, contra-

 

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dictorily... tonality becomes the ready servant of the beats within another 
level it claims to domesticate."

88

 

Does the same thing, strictly the same thing, apply to painting? In effect, 

the point does not make the line; the line sweeps away the deterritorialized 
point, carries it off under its outside influence; the line does not go from 
one point to another, but runs between points in a different direction that 
renders them indiscernible. The line has become the diagonal, which has 
broken free from the vertical and the horizontal. But the diagonal has 
already become the transversal, the semidiagonal or free straight line, the 
broken or angular line, or the curve—always in the midst of themselves. 
Between the white vertical and the black horizontal lie Klee's gray, 
Kandinsky's red, Monet's purple; each forms a block of color. This line is 
without origin, since it always begins off the painting, which only holds it 
by the middle; it is without coordinates, because it melds with a plane of 
consistency upon which it floats and that it creates; it is without localizable 
connection, because it has lost not only its representative function but any 
function of outlining a form of any kind—by this token, the line has 
become abstract, truly abstract and mutant, a visual block; and under these 
conditions the point assumes creative functions again, as a color-point or 
line-point.

89

 The line is between points, in their midst, and no longer goes 

from one point to another. It does not outline a shape. "He did not paint 
things, he painted between things." There is no falser problem in painting 
than depth and, in particular, perspective. For perspective is only a histori-
cal manner of occupying diagonals or transversals, lines of flight [lignes de 
fuite: 
here, the lines in a painting moving toward the vanishing point, or 
point de fuite—Trans.], in other words, of reterritorializing the moving vis-
ual block. We use the word "occupy" in the sense of "giving an occupation 
to," fixing a memory and a code, assigning a function. But the lines of 
flight, the transversals, are suitable for many other functions besides this 
molar function. Lines of flight as perspective lines, far from being made to 
represent depth, themselves invent the possibility of such a representation, 
which occupies them only for an instant, at a given moment. Perspective, 
and even depth, are the reterritorialization of lines of flight, which alone 
created painting by carrying it farther. What is called central perspective in 
particular plunged the multiplicity of escapes and the dynamism of lines 
into a punctual black hole. Conversely, it is true that problems of perspec-
tive triggered a whole profusion of creative lines, a mass release of visual 
blocks, at the very moment they claimed to have gained mastery over them. 
Is painting, in each of its acts of creation, engaged in a becoming as intense 
as that of music?

 

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Becoming-Music. We have tried to define in the case of Western music 

(although the other musical traditions confront an analogous problem, 

under different conditions, to which they find different solutions) a block 

of becoming at the level of expression, or a block of expression: this block of 

becoming rests on transversals that continually escape from the coordi-

nates or punctual systems functioning as musical codes at a given moment. 

It is obvious that there is a block of content corresponding to this block of 

expression. It is not really a correspondence; there would be no mobile 

"block" if a content, itself musical (and not a subject or a theme), were not 

always interfering with the expression. What does music deal with, what is 

the content indissociable from sound expression? It is hard to say, but it is 

something: child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a 

bird arrives, a bird flies off. We wish to say that these are not accidental 

themes in music (even if it is possible to multiply examples), much less imi-

tative exercises; they are something essential. Why a child, a woman, a 

bird? It is because musical expression is inseparable from a 

becoming-woman, a becoming-child, a becoming-animal that constitute 

its content. Why does the child die, or the bird fall as though pierced by 

an arrow? Because of the "danger" inherent in any line that escapes, in 

any line of flight or creative deterritorialization: the danger of veering 

toward destruction, toward abolition. Melisande [in Debussy's opera, 
Pelleas et Melisande—Trans.], a child-woman, a secret, dies twice ("it's 

the poor little dear's turn now"). Music is never tragic, music is joy. But 

there are times it necessarily gives us a taste for death; not so much 

happiness as dying happily, being extinguished. Not as a function of a 

death instinct it allegedly awakens in us, but of a dimension proper to its 

sound assemblage, to its sound machine, the moment that must be 

confronted, the moment the transversal turns into a line of abolition. Peace 
and  exasperation.

90

 Music has a thirst for destruction, every kind of 

destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation. Is that not its potential 

"fascism"? Whenever a musician writes In Memoriam, it is not so much a 

question of an inspirational motif or a memory, but on the contrary of a 

becoming that is only confronting its own danger, even taking a fall in 

order to rise again: a becoming-child, a becoming-woman, a 

becoming-animal, insofar as they are the content of music itself and 

continue to the point of death.

 

We would say that the refrain is properly musical content, the block of 

content proper to music. A child comforts itself in the dark or claps its 

hands or invents a way of walking, adapting it to the cracks in the sidewalk, 

or chants "Fort-Da" (psychoanalysts deal with the Fort-Da very poorly 

when they treat it as a phonological opposition or a symbolic component of 

the language-unconscious, when it is in fact a refrain). Tra la la. A woman 

sings to herself, "I heard her softly singing a tune to herself under her

 

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breath." A bird launches into its refrain. All of music is pervaded by bird 

songs, in a thousand different ways, from Jannequin to Messiaen. Frr, Frr. 

Music is pervaded by childhood blocks, by blocks of femininity. Music is 

pervaded by every minority, and yet composes an immense power. Chil-

dren's, women's, ethnic, and territorial refrains, refrains of love and 

destruction: the birth of rhythm. Schumann's work is made of refrains, of 

childhood blocks, which he treats in a very special way: his own kind of 

becoming-child, his own kind of becoming-woman, Clara. It would be pos-

sible to catalogue the transversal or diagonal utilizations of the refrain in 

the history of music, all of the children's Games and Kinderszenen, all of 

the bird songs. But such a catalogue would be useless because it would seem 

like a multiplication of examples of themes, subjects, and motifs, when it is 

in fact a question of the most essential and necessary content of music. The 

motif of the refrain may be anxiety, fear, joy, love, work, walking, territory 

. . . but the refrain itself is the content of music.

 

We are not at all saying that the refrain is the origin of music, or that 

music begins with it. It is not really known when music begins. The refrain 

is rather a means of preventing music, warding it off, or forgoing it. But 

music exists because the refrain exists also, because music takes up the 

refrain, lays hold of it as a content in a form of expression, because it forms 

a block with it in order to take it somewhere else. The child's refrain, which 
is not music, forms a block with the becoming-child of music: 
once again, 

this asymmetrical composition is necessary. "Ah, vous dirai-je maman" 

("Ah, mamma, now you shall know") in Mozart, Mozart's refrains. A 

theme in C, followed by twelve variations; not only is each note of the 

theme doubled, but the theme is doubled internally. Music submits the 

refrain to this very special treatment of the diagonal or transversal, it 

uproots the refrain from its territoriality. Music is a creative, active opera-

tion that consists in deterritorializing the refrain. Whereas the refrain is 

essentially territorial, territorializing, or reterritorializing, music makes it 

a deterritorialized content for a deterritorializing form of expression. Par-

don that sentence: what musicians do should be musical, it should be writ-

ten in music. Instead, we will give a figurative example: Mussorgsky's 

"Lullaby," in Songs and Dances of Death, presents an exhausted mother sit-

ting up with her sick child; she is relieved by a visitor, Death, who sings a 

lullaby in which each couplet ends with an obsessive, sober refrain, a repet-

itive rhythm with only one note, a point-block: "Shush, little child, sleep 

my little child" (not only does the child die, but the deterritorialization of 

the refrain is doubled by Death in person, who replaces the mother).

 

Is the situation similar for painting, and if so, how? In no way do we 

believe in a fine-arts system; we believe in very diverse problems whose 

solutions are found in heterogeneous arts. To us, Art is a false concept, a

 

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solely nominal concept; this does not, however, preclude the possibility of a 

simultaneous usage of the various arts within a determinable multiplicity. 

The "problem" within which painting is inscribed is that of the 
face-landscape.  That of music is entirely different: it is the problem of 

the refrain. Each arises at a certain moment, under certain conditions, on 

the line of its problem; but there is no possible structural or symbolic 

correspondence between the two, unless one translates them into punctual 

systems. We have distinguished the following three states of the 

landscape problem: (1) semiotic systems of corporeality, silhouettes, 

postures, colors, and lines (these semiotic systems are already present in 

profusion among animals; the head is part of the body, and the body has 

the milieu, the biotope as its correlate; these systems already display very 

pure lines as, for example, in the "grass stem" behavior); (2) an 

organization of the face, white wall/black holes, face/eyes, or facial 

profile/sideview of the eyes (this semiotic system of faciality has the 

landscape as its correlate: facialization of the entire body and 

landscapification of all the milieus, Christ as the European central point); 

(3) a deterritorialization of faces and landscapes, in favor of probe-heads 

whose lines no longer outline a form or form a contour, and whose colors 

no longer lay out a landscape (this is the pictorial semiotic system: Put 

the face and the landscape to flight. For example, what Mondrian 

correctly calls a "landscape": a pure, absolutely deterrito-rialized 

landscape).

 

For convenience, we presented three successive and distinct states, but 

only provisionally. We cannot decide whether animals have painting, even 

though they do not paint on canvas, and even when hormones induce their 

colors and lines; even here, there is little foundation for a clear-cut distinc-

tion between animals and human beings. Conversely, we must say that 

painting does not begin with so-called abstract art but recreates the silhou-

ettes and postures of corporeality, and is already fully in operation in the 

face-landscape organization (the way in which painters "work" the face of 

Christ, and make it leak from the religious code in all directions). The aim 

of painting has always been the deterritorialization of faces and land-

scapes, either by a reactivation of corporeality, or by a liberation of lines or 

colors, or both at the same time. There are many becomings-animal, 

becomings-woman, and becomings-child in painting.

 

The problem of music is different, if it is true that its problem is the 

refrain. Deterritorializing the refrain, inventing lines of deterritorializa-

tion for the refrain, implies procedures and constructions that have noth-

ing to do with those of painting (outside of vague analogies of the sort 

painters have often tried to establish). Again, it is not certain whether we 

can draw a dividing line between animals and human beings: Are there not, 

as Messiaen believes, musician birds and nonmusician birds? Is the bird's

 

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refrain necessarily territorial, or is it not already used for very subtle 

deterritorializations, for selective lines of flight? The difference between 

noise and sound is definitely not a basis for a definition of music, or even 

for the distinction between musician birds and nonmusician birds. Rather, 

it is the labor of the refrain: Does it remain territorial and territorializing, 

or is it carried away in a moving block that draws a transversal across all 

coordinates—and all of the intermediaries between the two? Music is pre-

cisely the adventure of the refrain: the way music lapses back into a refrain 

(in our head, in Swann's head, in the pseudo-probe-heads on TV and radio, 

the music of a great musician used as a signature tune, a ditty); the way it 

lays hold of the refrain, makes it more and more sober, reduced to a few 

notes, then takes it down a creative line that is so much richer, no origin or 

end of which is in sight. ..

 

Leroi-Gourhan established a distinction and correlation between two 

poles, "hand-tool" and "face-language." But there it was a question of dis-

tinguishing a form of content and a form of expression. Here we are consid-

ering expressions that hold their content within themselves, so we must 

make a different distinction: the face with its visual correlates (eyes) con-

cerns painting; the voice with its auditory correlates (the ear is itself a 

refrain, it is shaped like one) concerns music. Music is a 

deterrito-rialization of the voice, which becomes less and less tied to 

language, just as painting is a deterritorialization of the face. Traits of 

vocability can indeed be indexed to traits of faciality, as in lipreading; they 

are not, however, in correspondence, especially when they are carried off 

by the respective movements of music and painting. The voice is far ahead 

of the face, very far ahead. Entitling a musical work Visage (Face) thus 

seems to be the greatest of sound paradoxes.

91

 The only way to "line up" 

the two problems of painting and music is to take a criterion extrinsic to the 

fiction of the fine arts, to compare the forces of deterritorialization in each 

case. Music seems to have a much stronger deterritorializing force, at once 

more intense and much more collective, and the voice seems to have a much 

greater power of deterritorialization. Perhaps this trait explains the 

collective fascination exerted by music, and even the potentiality of the 

"fascist" danger we mentioned a little earlier: music (drums, trumpets) 

draws people and armies into a race that can go all the way to the abyss 

(much more so than banners and flags, which are paintings, means of 

classification and rallying). It may be that musicians are individually more 

reactionary than painters, more religious, less "social"; they nevertheless 

wield a collective force infinitely greater than that of painting: "The 

chorus formed by the assembly of the people is a very powerful bond..." 

It is always possible to explain this force by the material conditions of 

musical emission and reception, but it is preferable to take the reverse 

approach; these conditions are explained

 

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by the force of deterritorialization of music. It could be said that from the 

standpoint of the mutant abstract machine painting and music do not cor-

respond to the same thresholds, or that the pictorial machine and the musi-

cal machine do not have the same index. There is a "backwardness" of 

painting in relation to music, as Klee, the most musicianly of painters, 

observed.

92

 Maybe that is why many people prefer painting, or why aes-

thetics took painting as its privileged model: there is no question that it 

"scares" people less. Even its relations to capitalism and social formations 

are not at all of the same type.

 

Doubtless, in each case we must simultaneously consider factors of 

territoriality, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. Animal and 

child refrains seem to be territorial: therefore they are not "music." But 

when music lays hold of the refrain and deterritorializes it, and 

deterrito-rializes the voice, when it lays hold of the refrain and sends it 

racing off in a rhythmic sound block, when the refrain "becomes" 

Schumann or Debussy, it is through a system of melodic and harmonic 

coordinates by means of which music reterritorializes upon itself, qua 

music. Conversely, we shall see that in certain cases even the animal refrain 

possesses forces of deterritorialization much more intense than animal 

silhouettes, postures, and colors. We must therefore take a number of 

factors into consideration: relative territorialities, their respective 

deterritorializations, and their correlative reterritorializations, several 

types of them (for example, intrinsic reterritorializations such as musical 

coordinates, and extrinsic ones such as the deterioration of the refrain 

into a hackneyed formula, or music into a ditty). The fact that there is no 

deterritorialization without a special reterritorialization should prompt us 

to rethink the abiding correlation between the molar and the molecular: 

no flow, no becoming-molecular escapes from a molar formation without 

molar components accompanying it, forming passages or perceptible 

landmarks for the imperceptible processes.

 

The becoming-woman, the becoming-child of music are present in the 

problem of the machining of the voice. Machining the voice was the first 

musical operation. As we know, the problem was resolved in Western 

music in two different ways, in Italy and in England: the head voice of the 

countertenor, who sings "above his voice," or whose voice operates inside 

the sinuses and at the back of the throat and the palate without relying on 

the diaphragm or passing through the bronchial tubes; and the stomach 

voice of the castrati, "stronger, more voluminous, more languid," as if 

they gave carnal matter to the imperceptible, impalpable, and aerial. 

Dominique Fernandez wrote a fine book on this subject; he shows, fortu-

nately refraining from any psychoanalytic discussion of a link between 

music and castration, that the musical problem of the machinery of the

 

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voice necessarily implies the abolition of the overall dualism machine, in 

other words, the molar formation assigning voices to the "man or 

woman."

93

 Being a man or a woman no longer exists in music. It is not cer-

tain, however, that the myth of the androgyne Fernandez invokes is ade-

quate. It is a question not of myth but of real becoming. The voice itself 

must attain a becoming-woman or a becoming-child. That is the prodi-

gious content of music. It is no longer a question, as Fernandez observes, of 

imitating a woman or a child, even if it is a child who is singing. The musi-

cal voice itself becomes-child at the same time as the child 

becomes-sonorous, purely sonorous. No child could ever have done that, 

or if one did, it would be by becoming in addition something other than a 

child, a child belonging to a different, strangely sensual and celestial, 

world. In short, the deterritorialization is double: the voice is 

deterritorialized in a becoming-child, but the child it becomes is itself 

deterritorialized, unen-gendered, becoming. "The child grew wings," said 

Schumann. We find the same zigzag movement in the becomings-animal 

of music: Marcel More shows that the music of Mozart is permeated by a 

becoming-horse, or becomings-bird. But no musician amuses himself by 

"playing" horse or bird. If the sound block has a becoming-animal as its 

content, then the animal simultaneously becomes, in sonority, something 

else, something absolute, night, death, joy—certainly not a generality or a 

simplification, but a haecceity, this death, that night. Music takes as its 

content a becoming-animal; but in that becoming-animal the horse, for 

example, takes as its expression soft kettledrum beats, winged like hooves 

from heaven or hell; and the birds find expression in gruppeti, 

appoggiaturas, staccato notes that transform them into so many souls.

94

 It 

is the accents that form the diagonal in Mozart, the accents above all. If 

one does not follow the accents, if one does not observe them, one falls 

back into a relatively impoverished punctual system. The human 

musician is deterritorialized in the bird, but it is a bird that is itself 

deterritorialized, "transfigured," a celestial bird that has just as much of a 

becoming as that which becomes with it. Captain Ahab is engaged in an 

irresistible becoming-whale with Moby-Dick; but the animal, 

Moby-Dick, must simultaneously become an unbearable pure whiteness, 

a shimmering pure white wall, a silver thread that stretches out and supples 

up "like" a girl, or twists like a whip, or stands like a rampart. Can it be that 

literature sometimes catches up with painting, and even music? And that 

painting catches up with music? (More cites Klee's birds but on the other 

hand fails to understand what Messiaen says about bird song.) No art is 

imitative, no art can be imitative or figurative. Suppose a painter 

"represents" a bird; this is in fact a becoming-bird that can occur only to 

the extent that the bird itself is in the process of becoming something else, a 

pure line and pure color. Thus imitation self-destructs,

 

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since the imitator unknowingly enters into a becoming that conjugates 

with the unknowing becoming of that which he or she imitates. One imi-

tates only if one fails, when one fails. The painter and musician do not imi-

tate the animal, they become-animal at the same time as the animal 

becomes what they willed, at the deepest level of their concord with 

Nature.

95

 Becoming is always double, that which one becomes becomes no 

less than the one that becomes—block is formed, essentially mobile, never 

in equilibrium. Mondrian's is the perfect square. It balances on one corner 

and produces a diagonal that half-opens its closure, carrying away both 

sides.

 

Becoming is never imitating. When Hitchcock does birds, he does not 

reproduce bird calls, he produces an electronic sound like a field of intensi-

ties or a wave of vibrations, a continuous variation, like a terrible threat 

welling up inside us.

96

 And this applies not only to the "arts": Moby-Dick^ 

effect also hinges the pure lived experience of double becoming, and the 

book would not have the same beauty otherwise. The tarantella is a strange 

dance that magically cures or exorcises the supposed victims of a tarantula 

bite. But when the victim does this dance, can he or she be said to be imitat-

ing the spider, to be identifying with it, even in an identification through an 

"archetypal" or "agonistic" struggle? No, because the victim, the patient, 

the person who is sick, becomes a dancing spider only to the extent that the 

spider itself is supposed to become a pure silhouette, pure color and pure 

sound to which the person dances.

97

 One does not imitate; one constitutes 

a block of becoming. Imitation enters in only as an adjustment of the block, 

like a finishing touch, a wink, a signature. But everything of importance 

happens elsewhere: in the becoming-spider of the dance, which occurs on 

the condition that the spider itself becomes sound and color, orchestra and 

painting. Take the case of the local folk hero, Alexis the Trotter, who ran 

"like" a horse at extraordinary speed, whipped himself with a short switch, 

whinnied, reared, kicked, knelt, lay down on the ground in the manner of a 

horse, competed against them in races, and against bicycles and trains. He 

imitated a horse to make people laugh. But he had a deeper zone of proxim-

ity or indiscernibility. Sources tell us that he was never as much of a horse 

as when he played the harmonica: precisely because he no longer needed a 

regulating or secondary imitation. It is said that he called his harmonica his 

"chops-destroyer" and played the instrument twice as fast as anyone else, 

doubled the beat, imposed a nonhuman tempo.

98

 Alexis became all the 

more horse when the horse's bit became a harmonica, and the horse's trot 

went into double time. As always, the same must be said of the animals 

themselves. For not only do animals have colors and sounds, but they do 

not wait for the painter or musician to use those colors and sounds in a 

painting or music, in other words, to enter into determinate becomings-

 

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color and becomings-sounds by means of components of 

deterrito-rialization (we will return to this point later). Ethology is 

advanced enough to have entered this realm.

 

We are not at all arguing for an aesthetics of qualities, as if the pure 

quality (color, sound, etc.) held the secret of a becoming without measure, 

as in Philebus. Pure qualities still seem to us to be punctual systems: They 

are reminiscences, they are either transcendent or floating memories or 

seeds of phantasy. A functionalist conception, on the other hand, only 

considers the function a quality fulfills in a specific assemblage, or in 

passing from one assemblage to another. The quality must be considered 

from the standpoint of the becoming that grasps it, instead of becoming 

being considered from the standpoint of intrinsic qualities having the 

value of archetypes or phylogenetic memories. For example, whiteness, 

color, is gripped in a becoming-animal that can be that of the painter or of 

Captain Ahab, and at the same time in a becoming-color, a 

becoming-whiteness, that can be that of the animal itself. Moby-Dick's 

whiteness is the special index of his becoming-solitary. Colors, 

silhouettes, and animal refrains are indexes of becoming-conjugal or 

becoming-social that also imply components of deterritorialization. A 

quality functions only as a line of deterritorialization of an assemblage, or 

in going from one assemblage to another. This is why an animal-block is 

something other than a phylogenetic memory, and a childhood block 

something other than a childhood memory. In Kafka, a quality never 

functions for itself or as a memory, but rather rectifies an assemblage in 

which it is deterritori-alized, and, conversely, for which it provides a line 

of deterritorialization; for example, the childhood steeple passes into the 

castle tower, takes it at the level of its zone of indiscernibility 

("battlements that were irregular, broken, fumbling"), and launches down 

a line of flight (as if one of the tenants "had burst through the roof').

99

 If 

things are more complicated and less sober for Proust, it is because for 

him qualities retain an air of reminiscence or  phantasy, and yet with 

Proust as well these are functional blocks acting not as memories or 

phantasies but as a becoming-child, a becoming-woman, as components 

of deterritorialization passing from one assemblage to another.

 

To the theorems of simple deterritorialization we encountered earlier 

(in our discussion of the face),

100

 we can now add others on generalized 

double deterritorialization. Theorem Five: deterritorialization is always 

double, because it implies the coexistence of a major variable and a minor 

variable in simultaneous becoming (the two terms of a becoming do not 

exchange places, there is no identification between them, they are instead 

drawn into an asymmetrical block in which both change to the same extent, 

and which constitutes their zone of proximity). Theorem Six: in non-

 

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symmetrical double deterritorialization it is possible to assign a 

deter-ritorializing force and a deterritorialized force, even if the same 

force switches from one value to the other depending on the "moment" or 

aspect considered; furthermore, it is the least deterritorialized element 

that always triggers the deterritorialization of the most deterritorializing 

element, which then reacts back upon it in full force. Theorem Seven: the 

deterritorializing element has the relative role of expression, and the 

deterritorialized element the relative role of content (as evident in the 

arts); but not only does the content have nothing to do with an external sub-

ject or object, since it forms an asymmetrical block with the expression, but 

the deterritorialization carries the expression and the content to a proxim-

ity where the distinction between them ceases to be relevant, or where the 

deterritorialization creates their indiscernibility (example: the sound diag-

onal as the musical form of expression, and becomings-woman, -child, 

-animal as the contents proper to music, as refrains). Theorem Eight: one 

assemblage does not have the same forces or even speeds of deterrito-

rialization as another; in each instance, the indices and coefficients must 

be calculated according to the block of becoming under consideration, and 

in relation to the mutations of an abstract machine (for example, there is a 

certain slowness, a certain viscosity, of painting in relation to music; but 

one cannot draw a symbolic boundary between the human being and ani-

mal. One can only calculate and compare powers of deterritorialization). 

Fernandez demonstrates the presence of becomings-woman, becom-

ings-child in vocal music. Then he decries the rise of instrumental and 

orchestral music; he is particularly critical of Verdi and Wagner for having 

resexualized the voice, for having restored the binary machine in response 

to the requirements of capitalism, which wants a man to be a man and a 

woman a woman, each with his or her own voice: Verdi-voices, 

Wagner-voices, are reterritorialized upon man and woman. He explains the 

premature disappearance of Rossini and Bellini (the retirement of the first 

and death of the second) by their hopeless feeling that the vocal 

becomings of the opera were no longer possible. However, Fernandez does 

not ask under what auspices, and with what new types of diagonals, this 

occurs. To begin with, it is true that the voice ceases to be machined for 

itself, with simple instrumental accompaniment; it ceases to be a stratum 

or a line of expression that stands on its own. But why? Music crossed a 

new threshold of deterritorialization, beyond which it is the instrument 

that machines the voice, and the voice and instrument are carried on the 
same plane 
in a relation that is sometimes one of confrontation, sometimes 

one of compensation, sometimes one of exchange and complementarity. 

The lied, in particular Schumann's lieder, perhaps marks the first 

appearance of this pure movement that places the voice and the piano on 

the same plane of

 

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consistency, makes the piano an instrument of delirium, and prepares the 

way for Wagnerian opera. Even a case like Verdi's: it has often been said 

that his opera remains lyrical and vocal in spite of its destruction of the bel 

canto, and in spite of the importance of orchestration in the final works; 

still, voices are instrumentalized and make extraordinary gains in tessitura 

or extension (the production of the Verdi-baritone, of the Verdi-soprano). 

At any rate, the issue is not a given composer, especially not Verdi, or a 

given genre, but the more general movement affecting music, the slow 

mutation of the musical machine. If the voice returns to a binary distribu-

tion of the sexes, this occurs in relation to binary groupings of instruments 

in orchestration. There are always molar systems in music that serve as 

coordinates; this dualist system of the sexes that reappears on the level of 

the voice, this molar and punctual distribution, serves as a foundation for 

new molecular flows that then intersect, conjugate, are swept up in a kind 

of instrumentation and orchestration that tend to be part of the creation 

itself. Voices may be reterritorialized on the distribution of the two sexes, 

but the continuous sound flow still passes between them as in a difference 

of potential.

 

This brings us to the second point: the principal problem concerning 

this new threshold of deterritorialization of the voice is no longer that of a 

properly vocal becoming-woman or becoming-child, but that of a 

becoming-molecular in which the voice itself is instrumentalized. Of 

course, becomings-woman and -child remain just as important, even take 

on new importance, but only to the extent that they convey another truth: 

what was produced was already a molecular child, a molecular woman .. . 

We need only think of Debussy: the becoming-child and the 

becoming-woman in his works are intense but are now inseparable from 

a molecu-larization of the motif, a veritable "chemistry" achieved 

through orchestration. The child and the woman are now inseparable from 

the sea and the water molecule (Sirens,  precisely, represents one of the 

first complete attempts to integrate the voice with the orchestra). Already 

Wagner was reproached for the "elementary" character of his music, for its 

aquaticism, or its "atomization" of the motif, "a subdivision into infinitely 

small units." This becomes even clearer if we think of becoming-animal: 

birds are still just as important, yet the reign of birds seems to have been 

replaced by the age of insects, with its much more molecular vibrations, 

chirring, rustling, buzzing, clicking, scratching, and scraping. Birds are 

vocal, but insects are instrumental: drums and violins, guitars and 

cymbals.

101

 A becoming-insect has replaced becoming-bird, or forms a 

block with it. The insect is closer, better able to make audible the truth that 

all becomings are molecular (cf. Martenot's waves, electronic music). The 

molecular has the capacity to make the elementary communicate with the 
cosmic: precisely

 

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1730: BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING-ANIMAL... D 309

 

because it effects a dissolution of form that connects the most diverse lon-

gitudes and latitudes, the most varied speeds and slownesses, which guar-

antees a continuum by stretching variation far beyond its formal limits. 

Rediscover Mozart, and that the "theme" was a variation from the start. 

Varese explains that the sound molecule (the block) separates into ele-

ments arranged in different ways according to variable relations of speed, 

but also into so many waves or flows of a sonic energy irradiating the entire 

universe, a headlong line of flight. That is how he populated the Gobi 

desert with insects and stars constituting a becoming-music of the world, or 

a diagonal for a cosmos. Messiaen presents multiple chromatic durations 

in coalescence, "alternating between the longest and the shortest, in order 

to suggest the idea of the relations between the infinitely long durations of 

the stars and mountains and the infinitely short ones of the insects and 

atoms: a cosmic, elementary power that... derives above all from the labor 

of rhythm."

102

 The same thing that leads a musician to discover the birds 

also leads him to discover the elementary and the cosmic. Both combine to 

form a block, a universe fiber, a diagonal or complex space. Music dis-

patches molecular flows. Of course, as Messiaen says, music is not the priv-

ilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains; the 

question in music is that of a power of deterritorialization permeating 

nature, animals, the elements, and deserts as much as human beings. The 

question is more what is not musical in human beings, and what already is 

musical in nature. Moreover, what Messiaen discovered in music is the 

same thing the ethologists discovered in animals: human beings are hardly 

at an advantage, except in the means of overcoding, of making punctual 

systems. That is even the opposite of having an advantage; through 

becomings-woman, -child, -animal, or -molecular, nature opposes its 

power, and the power of music, to the machines of human beings, the roar 

of factories and bombers. And it is necessary to reach that point, it is neces-

sary for the nonmusical sound of the human being to form a block with the 

becoming-music of sound, for them to confront and embrace each other 

like two wrestlers who can no longer break free from each other's grasp, and 

slide down a sloping line: "Let the choirs represent the survivors. . . Faintly 

one hears the sound of cicadas. Then the notes of a lark, followed by the 

mockingbird. Someone laughs ... A woman sobs . . . From a male a great 

shout: 

WE ARE LOST

!

 

A woman's voice: 

WE ARE SAVED

!

 

Staccato cries: Lost! 

Saved! Lost! Saved!"

103

 

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11. 1837: Of the Refrain

 

 

Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922 Copyright © 1987 

by Cosmopress, Geneva Watercolor, pen and ink, I6V4 x 

12" (without margins) Collection, The Museum of 

Modern Art, New York Purchase

 

310

 

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1837: 

OF THE REFRAIN □ 311

 

I. A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under 
his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients 
himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a 
calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Per-
haps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself 
is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos 
and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority 
in Ariadne's thread. Or the song of Orpheus.

 

II.  Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to 

draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited 
space. Many, very diverse, components have a part in this, landmarks and 
marks of all kinds. This was already true of the previous case. But now the 
components are used for organizing a space, not for the momentary deter 
mination of a center. The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possi 
ble, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or 
a deed to do. This involves an activity of selection, elimination and extrac 
tion, in order to prevent the interior forces of the earth from being sub 
merged, to enable them to resist, or even to take something from chaos 
across the filter or sieve of the space that has been drawn. Sonorous or vocal 
components are very important: a wall of sound, or at least a wall with 
some sonic bricks in it. A child hums to summon the strength for the 
schoolwork she has to hand in. A housewife sings to herself, or listens to the 
radio, as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work. Radios and televi 
sion sets are like sound walls around every household and mark territories 
(the neighbor complains when it gets too loud). For sublime deeds like the 
foundation of a city or the fabrication of a golem, one draws a circle, or bet 
ter yet walks in a circle as in a children's dance, combining rhythmic vowels 
and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of creation as to the 
differentiated parts of an organism. A mistake in speed, rhythm, or har 
mony would be catastrophic because it would bring back the forces of 
chaos, destroying both creator and creation.

 

III.  Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets some 

one in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens 
the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in 
another region, one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended 
on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shel 
ters. This time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic 
forces. One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is 
to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the 
thread of a tune. Along sonorous, gestural, motor lines that mark the 
customary path of a child and graft themselves onto or begin to bud "lines

 

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of drift" with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and 

sonorities.

1

 

These are not three successive moments in an evolution. They are three 

aspects of a single thing, the Refrain {ritournelle). They are found in tales 

(both horror stories and fairy tales), and in lieder as well. The refrain has 

all three aspects, it makes them simultaneous or mixes them: sometimes, 

sometimes, sometimes. Sometimes chaos is an immense black hole in 

which one endeavors to fix a fragile point as a center. Sometimes one 

organizes around that point a calm and stable "pace" (rather than a form): 

the black hole has become a home. Sometimes one grafts onto that pace a 

breakaway from the black hole. Paul Klee presented these three aspects, 

and their interlinkage, in a most profound way. He calls the black hole a 

"gray point" for pictorial reasons. The gray point starts out as 

nonlocal-izable, nondimensional chaos, the force of chaos, a tangled 

bundle of aberrant lines. Then the point "jumps over itself and radiates a 

dimensional space with horizontal layers, vertical cross sections, 

unwritten customary lines, a whole terrestrial interior force (this force also 

appears, at a more relaxed pace, in the atmosphere and in water). The gray 

point (black hole) has thus jumped from one state to another, and no 

longer represents chaos but the abode or home. Finally, the point launches 

out of itself, impelled by wandering centrifugal forces that fan out to the 

sphere of the cosmos: one "tries convulsively to fly from the earth, but at 

the following level one actually rises above it... powered by centrifugal 

forces that triumph over gravity."

2

 

The role of the refrain has often been emphasized: it is territorial, a terri-

torial assemblage. Bird songs: the bird sings to mark its territory. The 

Greek modes and Hindu rhythms are themselves territorial, provincial, 

regional. The refrain may assume other functions, amorous, professional 

or social, liturgical or cosmic: it always carries earth with it; it has a land 

(sometimes a spiritual land) as its concomitant; it has an essential relation 

to a Natal, a Native. A musical "nome" is a little tune, a melodic formula 

that seeks recognition and remains the bedrock or ground of polyphony 
{cantus firmus). The  nomos  as customary, unwritten law is inseparable 

from a distribution of space, a distribution in space. By that token, it is 
ethos, but the ethos is also the Abode.

3

 Sometimes one goes from chaos to 

the threshold of a territorial assemblage: directional components, 

infra-assemblage. Sometimes one organizes the assemblage: dimensional 

components, intra-assemblage. Sometimes one leaves the territorial 

assemblage for other assemblages, or for somewhere else entirely: 

interassem-blage, components of passage or even escape. And all three at 

once. Forces of chaos, terrestrial forces, cosmic forces: all of these 

confront each other and converge in the territorial refrain.

 

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From chaos, Milieus and Rhythms are born. This is the concern of very 

ancient cosmogonies. Chaos is not without its own directional compo-

nents, which are its own ecstasies. We have seen elsewhere how all kinds of 

milieus, each defined by a component, slide in relation to one another, over 

one another. Every milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of 

space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component. Thus 

the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of 

composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of 

membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and 

actions-perceptions. Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by peri-

odic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or 

transduction. Transcoding or transduction is the manner in which one 

milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop 

another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it. The notion of the 

milieu is not unitary: not only does the living thing continually pass from 

one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another, they are essen-

tially communicating. The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens 

them with exhaustion or intrusion. Rhythm is the milieus' answer to chaos. 

What chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between—between two 

milieus, rhythm-chaos or the chaosmos: "Between night and day, between 

that which is constructed and that which grows naturally, between muta-

tions from the inorganic to the organic, from plant to animal, from animal 

to humankind, yet without this series constituting a progression ..." In this 

in-between, chaos becomes rhythm, not inexorably, but it has a chance to. 

Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the milieu of all milieus. There is 

rhythm whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to 

another, a communication of milieus, coordination between heterogene-

ous space-times. Drying up, death, intrusion have rhythm. It is well known 

that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence: there 

is nothing less rhythmic than a military march. The tom-tom is not 1 -2, the 

waltz is not 1, 2, 3, music is not binary or ternary, but rather forty-seven 

basic meters, as in Turkish music. Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a 

coded form whose unit of measure may vary, but in a noncommunicating 

milieu, whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is 

always undergoing transcoding. Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical; 

it ties together critical moments, or ties itself together in passing from one 

milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by 

heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction. Bachelard is right to say that 
"the link between truly active moments (rhythm) is always effected on a dif-
ferent plane from the one upon which the action is carried out."

4

 Rhythm is 

never on the same plane as that which has rhythm. Action occurs in a 

milieu, whereas rhythm is located between two milieus, or between two

 

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intermilieus, on the fence, between night and day, at dusk, twilight  or 
Zwielicht,  Haecceity. To change milieus, taking them as you find them: 

Such is rhythm. Landing, splashdown, takeoff.. . This easily avoids an 

aporia that threatened to introduce meter into rhythm, despite all the dec-

larations of intent to the contrary: How can one proclaim the constituent 

inequality of rhythm while at the same time admitting implied vibrations, 

periodic repetitions of components? A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of 

a periodic repetition, but one whose only effect is to produce a difference 

by which the milieu passes into another milieu. It is the difference that is 

rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless produces it: productive 

repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter. This is the "critical 

solution of the antinomy."

 

One case of transcoding is particularly important: when a code is not 

content to take or receive components that are coded differently, and 

instead takes or receives fragments of a different code as such. The first 

case pertains to the leaf-water relation, the second to the spider-fly rela-

tion. It has often been noted that the spider web implies that there are 

sequences of the fly's own code in the spider's code; it is as though the spi-

der had a fly in its head, a fly "motif," a fly "refrain." The implication may 

be reciprocal, as with the wasp and the orchid, or the snapdragon and the 

bumblebee. Jakob von Uexkiill has elaborated an admirable theory of 

transcodings. He sees the components as melodies in counterpoint, each of 

which serves as a motif for another: Nature as music.

5

 Whenever there is 

transcoding, we can be sure that there is not a simple addition, but the con-

stitution of a new plane, as of a surplus value. A melodic or rhythmic plane, 

surplus value of passage or bridging. The two cases, however, are never 

pure; they are in reality mixed (for example, the relation of the leaf, this 

time not to water in general but to rain).

 

Still, we do not yet have a Territory, which is not a milieu, not even an 

additional milieu, nor a rhythm or passage between milieus. The territory 

is in fact an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that "territorializes" 

them. The territory is the product of a territorialization of milieus and 

rhythms. It amounts to the same thing to ask when milieus and rhythms 

become territorialized, and what the difference is between a nonterritorial 

animal and a territorial animal. A territory borrows from all the milieus; it 

bites into them, seizes them bodily (although it remains vulnerable to 

intrusions). It is built from aspects or portions of milieus. It itself has an 

exterior milieu, an interior milieu, an intermediary milieu, and an 

annexed milieu. It has the interior zone of a residence or shelter, the exte-

rior zone of its domain, more or less retractable limits or membranes, 

intermediary or even neutralized zones, and energy reserves or annexes. It 

is by essence marked by "indexes," which may be components taken from

 

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any of the milieus: materials, organic products, skin or membrane states, 

energy sources, action-perception condensates. There is a territory pre-

cisely when milieu components cease to be directional, becoming dimen-

sional instead, when they cease to be functional to become expressive. 

There is a territory when the rhythm has expressiveness. What defines the 

territory is the emergence of matters of expression (qualities). Take the 

example of color in birds or fish: color is a membrane state associated with 

interior hormonal states, but it remains functional and transitory as long as 

it is tied to a type of action (sexuality, aggressiveness, flight). It becomes 

expressive, on the other hand, when it acquires a temporal constancy and a 

spatial range that make it a territorial, or rather territorializing, mark: a sig-

nature.

6

 The question is not whether color resumes its functions or fulfills 

new ones in the territory. It is clear that it does, but this reorganization of 

functions implies first of all that the component under consideration has 

become expressive and that its meaning, from this standpoint, is to mark a 

territory. The same species of birds may have colored and uncolored repre-

sentatives; the colored birds have a territory, whereas the all-white ones are 

gregarious. We know what role urine and excrement play in marking, but 

territorial excrement, for example, in the rabbit, has a particular odor 

owing to specialized anal glands. Many monkeys, when serving as guards, 

expose their brightly colored sexual organs: the penis becomes a rhythmic 

and expressive color-carrier that marks the limits of the territory.

7

 A milieu 

component becomes both a quality and a property, quale and proprium. It 

has been remarked how quick this becoming is in many cases, the rapidity 

with which a territory is constituted at the same time as expressive quali-

ties are selected or produced. The brown stagemaker {Scenopoeetes 
dentirostris) 
lays down landmarks each morning by dropping leaves it picks 

from its tree, and then turning them upside down so the paler underside 

stands out against the dirt: inversion produces a matter of expression.

8

 

The territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark; it is the 

mark that makes the territory. Functions in a territory are not primary; 

they presuppose a territory-producing expressiveness. In this sense, the 

territory, and the functions performed within it, are products of 

territorialization. Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become 

expressive, or of milieu components that have become qualitative. The 

marking of a territory is dimensional, but it is not a meter, it is a rhythm. It 

retains the most general characteristic of rhythm, which is to be inscribed 

on a different plane than that of its actions. But now the distinction 

between the two planes is between territorializing expressions and 

territorialized functions. That is why we cannot accept a thesis like 

Lorenz's, which tends to make aggressiveness the basis of the territory: the 

territory would then be the product of the phylogenetic evolution of an

 

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instinct of aggression, starting at the point where that instinct became 

intraspecific, was turned against the animal's own kind. A territorial ani-

mal would direct its aggressiveness against members of its own species; the 

species would gain the selective advantage of distributing its members 

throughout a space where each would have its own place.

9

 This ambiguous 

thesis, which has dangerous political overtones, seems to us to have little 

foundation. It is obvious that the function of aggression changes pace when 

it becomes intraspecific. but this reorganization of the function, rather 

than explaining the territory, presupposes it. there are numerous reorgani-

zations within the territory, which also affect sexuality, hunting, etc.; there 

are even new functions, such as building a place to live. These functions are 

organized or created only because they are territorialized, and not the other 

way around. The T factor, the territorializing factor, must be sought 

elsewhere: precisely in the becoming-expressive of rhythm or melody, in 

other words, in the emergence or proper qualities (color, odor, sound, 

silhouette...).

 

Can this becoming, this emergence, be called Art? That would make the 

territory a result of art. The artist: the first person to set out a boundary 

stone, or to make a mark. Property, collective or individual, is derived from 

that even when it is in the service of war and oppression. Property is funda-

mentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard. As Lorenz 

says, coral fish are posters. The expressive is primary in relation to the pos-

sessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily 

appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being.

10

 Not in 

the sense that these qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense that they 

delineate a territory that will belong to the subject that carries or produces 

them. These qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is 

not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a 

domain, an abode. The signature is not the indication of a person; it is the 

chancy formation of a domain. Abodes have proper names, and are 

inspired. "The inspired and their abodes . . ."; it is with the abode that 

inspiration arises. No sooner do I like a color that I make it my standard or 

placard. One puts one's signature on something just as one plants one's flag 

on a piece of land. A high school supervisor stamped all the leaves strewn 

about the school yard and then put them back in their places. He had 

signed. Territorial marks are readymades. And what is called art brut in not 

at all pathological or primitive; it is merely this constitution, this freeing, of 

matters of expression in the movement of territoriality: the base or ground 

of art. Take anything and make it a matter of expression. The stagemaker 

practices art brut. Artists are stagemakers, even when they tear up their 

own posters. Of course, from this standpoint art is not the privilege of 

human beings. Messiaen is right in saying that many birds are not only vir-

 

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tuosos but artists, above all in their territorial songs (if a robber "improp-

erly wishes to occupy a spot which doesn't belong to it, the true owner sings 

and sings so well that the predator goes away.... If the robber sings better 

than the true proprietor, the proprietor yields his place").

11

 The refrain is 

rhythm and melody that have been territorialized because they have 

become expressive—and have become expressive because they are 

territorializing. We are not going in circles. What we wish to say is that 

there is a self-movement of expressive qualities. Expressiveness is not 

reducible to the immediate effects of an impulse triggering an action in a 

milieu: effects of that kind are subjective impressions or emotions rather 

than expressions (as, for example, the temporary color a freshwater fish 

takes on under a given impulse). On the other hand, expressive qualities, 

the colors of the coral fish, for example, are auto-objective, in other words, 

find an objectivity in the territory they draw.

 

What is this objective movement? What does a matter do as a matter of 

expression? It is first of all a poster or placard, but that is not all it is. It 

merely takes that route. The signature becomes style. In effect, expressive 
qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with one another 
that "express" the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of 
impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances. 
To express is not to depend 

upon; there is an autonomy of expression. On the one hand, expressive 

qualities entertain internal relations with one another that constitute terri-
torial motifs; 
sometimes these motifs loom above the internal impulses, 

sometimes they are superposed upon them, sometimes they ground one 

impulse in another, sometimes they pass and cause a passage from one 

impulse to another, sometimes they insert themselves between them—but 

they are not themselves "pulsed." Sometimes these nonpulsed motifs arise 

in a fixed form, or seem to arise that way, but at other times the same ones, 

or others, take on variable speed and articulation; it is as much their varia-

bility as their fixity that makes them independent of the drives they com-

bine or neutralize. "We know that our dogs go through motions of smelling, 

seeking, chasing, biting, and shaking to death with equal enthusiasm 

whether they are hungry or not."

12

 Another example is the dance of the 

stickleback. Its zigzag is a motif in which the zig is tied to an aggressive 

drive toward the partner, and the zag to a sexual drive toward the nest; yet 

the zig and the zag are accented, or even oriented, differently. On the other 

hand, expressive qualities also entertain other internal relations that pro-

duce territorial counterpoints: this refers to the manner in which they con-

stitute points in the territory that place the circumstances of the external 

milieu in counterpoint. For example, an enemy approaches or suddenly 

appears, or rain starts to fall, the sun rises, the sun sets... Here again, the 

points or counterpoints are autonomous in their fixity or variability in

 

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relation to the circumstances of the exterior milieu whose relation to the 

territory they express. For this relation can be given without the circum-

stances being given, just as the relation to the impulses can be given with-

out the impulse being given. And even when the impulses and circum-

stances are given, the relation is prior to what it places in relation. 

Relations between matters of expression express relations of the territory 

to internal impulses and external circumstances: they have an autonomy 

within this very expression. In truth, territorial motifs and counterpoints 

explore potentialities of the interior or exterior milieu. Ethologists have 

grouped these phenomena under the concept of "ritualization" and have 

demonstrated the link between animal rituals and territory. But this word 

is not necessarily appropriate for these nonpulsed motifs and nonlocalized 

counterpoints, since it accounts for neither their variability nor their fixity. 

It is not one or the other, fixity or variability; certain motifs or points are 

fixed only if others are variable, or else they are fixed on one occasion and 

variable on another.

 

We should say, rather, that territorial motifs form rhythmic faces or char-

acters, and that territorial counterpoints form melodic landscapes. There is 

a rhythmic character when we find that we no longer have the simple situa-

tion of a rhythm associated with a character, subject, or impulse. The 

rhythm itself is now the character in its entirety; as such, it may remain con-

stant, or it may be augmented or diminished by the addition or subtraction 

of sounds or always increasing or decreasing durations, and by an amplifi-

cation or elimination bringing death or resuscitation, appearance or disap-

pearance. Similarly, the melodic landscape is no longer a melody associ-

ated with a landscape; the melody itself is a sonorous landscape in 

counterpoint to a virtual landscape. That is how we get beyond the placard 

stage: although each expressive quality, each matter of expression consid-

ered in itself, is a placard or poster, the analysis of them is nevertheless 

abstract. Expressive qualities entertain variable or constant relations with 

one another (that is what matters of expression do); they no longer consti-

tute placards that mark a territory, but motifs and counterpoints that 

express the relation of the territory to interior impulses or exterior circum-

stances, whether or not they are given. No longer signatures, but a style. 

What objectively distinguishes a musician bird from a nonmusician bird is 

precisely this aptitude for motifs and counterpoints that, if they are varia-

ble, or even when they are constant, make matters of expression something 

other than a poster—a style—since they articulate rhythm and harmonize 

melody. We can then say that the musician bird goes from sadness to joy or 

that it greets the rising sun or endangers itself in order to sing or sings better 

than another, etc. None of these formulations carries the slightest risk of 

anthropomorphism, or implies the slightest interpretation. It is instead a

 

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kind of geomorphism. The relation to joy and sadness, the sun, danger, per-

fection, is given in the motif and counterpoint, even if the term of each of 

these relations is not given. In the motif and the counterpoint, the sun, joy 

or sadness, danger, become sonorous, rhythmic, or melodic.

13

 

Human music also goes this route. For Swann, the art lover, Vinteuil's 

little phrase often acts as a placard associated with the Bois de Boulogne 

and the face and character of Odette: as if it reassured Swann that the Bois 

de Boulogne was indeed his territory, and Odette his possession. There is 

already something quite artistic in this way of hearing music. Debussy crit-

icized Wagner, comparing his leitmotifs to signposts signaling the hidden 

circumstances of a situation, the secret impulses of a character. The criti-

cism is accurate, on one level or at certain moments. But as the work devel-

ops, the motifs increasingly enter into conjunction, conquer their own 
plane, 
become autonomous from the dramatic action, impulses, and situa-

tions, and independent of characters and landscapes; they themselves 

become melodic landscapes and rhythmic characters continually enrich-

ing their internal relations. They may then remain relatively constant, or 

on the contrary grow or diminish, expand or contract, vary in the speed at 

which they unfold: in both cases, they are no longer pulsed and localized, 

and even the constants are in the service of variation; the more provisory 

they are, the more they display the continuous variation they resist, the 

more rigid they become.

14

 Proust was among the first to underscore this life 

of the Wagnerian motif. Instead of the motif being tied to a character who 

appears, the appearance of the motif itself constitutes a rhythmic character 

in "the plenitude of a music that is indeed filled with so many strains, each 

of which is a being."

15

 It is not by chance that the apprenticeship of the 

Recherche  pursues an analogous discovery in relation to Vinteuil's little 

phrases: they do not refer to a landscape; they carry and develop within 

themselves landscapes that do not exist on the outside (the white sonata 

and red septet. ..). The discovery of the properly melodic landscape and 

the properly rhythmic character marks the moment of art when it ceases to 

be a silent painting on a signboard. This may not be art's last word, but art 

went that route, as did the bird: motifs and counterpoints that form an 

autodevelopment, in other words, a style. The interiorization of the 

melodic or sonorous landscape finds its exemplary form in Liszt and that 

of the rhythmic character in Wagner. More generally, the lied is the musical 

art of the landscape, the most pictorial, impressionist form of music. But 

the two poles are so closely bound that in the lied as well Nature appears as 

a rhythmic character with infinite transformations.

 

The territory is first of all the critical distance between two beings of the 

same species: Mark your distance. What is mine is first of all my distance; I 

possess only distances. Don't anybody touch me, I growl if anyone enters

 

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my territory, I put up placards. Critical distance is a relation based on mat-

ters of expression. It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of 

chaos knocking at the door. Mannerism: the ethos is both abode and man-

ner, homeland and style. This is evident in territorial dances termed 

baroque or mannerist, in which each pose, each movement, establishes a 

distance of this kind (sarabands, allemandes, bourrees, gavottes.. .).

16 

There is a whole art of poses, postures, silhouettes, steps, and voices. Two 

schizophrenics converse or stroll according to laws of boundary and terri-

tory that may escape us. How very important it is, when chaos threatens, to 

draw an inflatable, portable territory. If need be, I'll put my territory on my 

own body, I'll territorialize my body: the house of the tortoise, the hermit-

age of the crab, but also tattoos that make the body a territory. Critical dis-

tance is not a meter, it is a rhythm. But the rhythm, precisely, is caught up in 

a becoming that sweeps up the distances between characters, making them 

rhythmic characters that are themselves more or less distant, more or less 

combinable (intervals). Two animals of the same sex and species confront 

each other: the rhythm of the first one "expands" when it approaches its 

territory or the center of its territory; the rhythm of the second contracts 

when it moves away from its territory. Between the two, at the boundaries, 

an oscillational constant is established: an active rhythm, a passively 

endured rhythm, and a witness rhythm?

17

 Or else the animal opens its terri-

tory a crack for a partner of the opposite sex: a complex rhythmic character 

forms through duets, antiphonal or alternating singing, as in the case of 

African shrikes. Furthermore, we must simultaneously take into account 

two aspects of the territory: it not only ensures and regulates the coexis-

tence of members of the same species by keeping them apart, but makes 

possible the coexistence of a maximum number of different species in the 

same milieu by specializing them. Members of the same species enter into 

rhythmic characters at the same time as different species enter into 

melodic landscapes; for the landscapes are peopled by characters and the 

characters belong to landscapes. An example is Messiaen's 
Chrono-chromie,  with its eighteen bird songs forming autonomous 

rhythmic characters and simultaneously realizing an extraordinary 

landscape in complex counterpoint, with invented or implicit chords.

 

Not only does art not wait for human beings to begin, but we may ask if 

art ever appears among human beings, except under artificial and belated 

conditions. It has often been noted that human art was for a long time 

bound up with work and rites of a different nature. Saying this, however, 

perhaps has no more weight than saying that art begins with human beings. 

For it is true that a territory has two notable effects: a reorganization of 
functions and a regrouping of forces. 
On the one hand, when functional 

activities are territorialized they necessarily change pace (the creation of

 

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new functions such as building a dwelling, or the transformation of old 

functions, as when aggressiveness changes nature and becomes 

intra-specific). This is like a nascent theme of specialization or 

professionalism: if the territorial refrain so often passes into professional 

refrains, it is because professions assume that various activities are 

performed in the same milieu, and that the same activity has no other 

agents in the same territory. Professional refrains intersect in the milieu, 

like merchants' cries, but each marks a territory within which the same 

activity cannot be performed, nor the same cry ring out. In animals as in 

human beings, there are rules of critical distance for competition: my stretch 

of sidewalk. In short, a territorialization of functions is the condition for 

their emergence as "occupations" or "trades." Thus intraspecific or 

specialized aggressiveness is necessarily a territorialized aggressiveness; 

it does not explain the territory since it itself derives from it. It is 

immediately apparent that all activities within the territory adopt a new 

practical pace. But that is no reason to conclude that art in itself does not 

exist here, for it is present in the territorializing factor that is the 

necessary condition for the emergence of the work-function.

 

The situation is the same if we consider the other effect of territori-

alization. That other effect, which relates not to occupations but to rites 

and religions, consists in this: the territory groups all the forces of the dif-

ferent milieus together in a single sheaf constituted by the forces of the 

earth. The attribution of all the diffuse forces to the earth as receptacle or 

base takes place only at the deepest level of each territory. "The surround-

ing milieu was experienced as a unity; it is very hard to distinguish in these 

primal intuitions what belongs properly to the earth from what is merely 

manifested through the earth: mountains, forests, water, vegetation."

18 

The forces of air and water, bird and fish, thus become forces of the earth. 

Moreover, although in extension the territory separates the interior forces 

of the earth from the exterior forces of chaos, the same does not occur in 

"intension," in the dimension of depth, where the two types of force clasp 

and are wed in a battle whose only criterion and stakes is the earth. There is 

always a place, a tree or grove, in the territory where all the forces come 

together in a hand-to-hand combat of energies. The earth is this close 

embrace.

19

 This intense center is simultaneously inside the territory, and 

outside several territories that converge on it at the end of an immense pil-

grimage (hence the ambiguities of the "natal"). Inside or out, the territory 

is linked to this intense center, which is like the unknown homeland, terres-

trial source of all forces friendly and hostile, where everything is decided.

20 

So we must once again acknowledge that religion, which is common to 

human beings and animals, occupies territory only because it depends on 

the raw aesthetic and territorializing factor as its necessary condition. It is

 

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this factor that at the same time organizes the functions of the milieu into 

occupations and binds the forces of chaos in rites and religions, which are 

forces of the earth. Territorializing marks simultaneously develop into 
motifs and counterpoints, and reorganize functions and regroup forces. 
But 

by virtue of this, the territory already unleashes something that will surpass 

it.

 

We always come back to this "moment": the becoming-expressive of 

rhythm, the emergence of expressive proper qualities, the formation of 

matters of expression that develop into motifs and counterpoints. We 

therefore need a notion, even an apparently negative one, that can grasp 

this fictional or raw moment. The essential thing is the disjunction notice-

able between the code and the territory. The territory arises in a free margin 

of the code, one that is not indeterminate but rather is determined differ-

ently. Each milieu has its own code, and there is perpetual transcoding 

between milieus; the territory, on the other hand, seems to form at the level 

of a certain decoding.  Biologists have stressed the importance of these 

determined margins, which are not to be confused with mutations, in other 

words, changes internal to the code: here, it is a question of duplicated 

genes or extra chromosomes that are not inside the genetic code, are free of 

function, and offer a free matter for variation.

21

 But it is very unlikely that 

this kind of matter could create new species independently of mutations, 

unless it were accompanied by events of another order capable of multiply-

ing the interactions of the organism with its milieus. Territorialization is 

precisely such a factor that lodges on the margins of the code of a single spe-

cies and gives the separate representatives of that species the possibility of 

differentiating. It is because there is a disjunction between the territory 

and the code that the territory can indirectly induce new species. Wherever 

territoriality appears, it establishes an intraspecific critical distance 

between members of the same species; it is by virtue of its own disjunction 

in relation to specific differences that it becomes an oblique, indirect means 

of differentiation. From all of these standpoints, decoding appears as the 

"negative" of the territory, and the most obvious distinction between terri-

torial animals and nonterritorial animals is that the former are much less 

coded than the latter. We have said enough bad things about the territory 

that we can now evaluate all the creations that tend toward it, occur within 

it, and result or will result from it.

 

We have gone from forces of chaos to forces of the earth. From milieus to 

territory. From functional rhythms to the becoming-expressive of rhythm. 

From phenomena of transcoding to phenomena of decoding. From milieu 

functions to territorialized functions. It is less a question of evolution than 

of passage, bridges and tunnels. We saw that milieus continually pass into 

one another. Now we see that the milieus pass into the territory. The

 

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OF THE REFRAIN D 323

 

expressive qualities we term aesthetic are certainly not "pure" or symbolic 

qualities but proper qualities, in other words, appropriative qualities, pas-

sages from milieu components to territory components. The territory itself 

is a place of passage. The territory is the first assemblage, the first thing to 

constitute an assemblage; the assemblage is fundamentally territorial. But 

how could it not already be in the process of passing into something else, 

into other assemblages? That is why we could not talk about the constitu-

tion of the territory without also talking about its internal organization. 

We could not describe the infra-assemblage (posters or placards) without 

also discussing the intra-assemblage (motifs and counterpoints). Nor can 

we say anything about the intra-assemblage without already being on the 

path to other assemblages, or elsewhere. The passage of the Refrain. The 

refrain moves in the direction of the territorial assemblage and lodges itself 

there or leaves. In a general sense, we call a refrain any aggregate of matters 
of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and 
landscapes 
(there are optical, gestural, motor, etc., refrains). In the narrow 

sense, we speak of a refrain when an assemblage is sonorous or "domi-

nated" by sound—but why do we assign this apparent privilege to sound?

 

We are now in the intra-assemblage. Its organization is very rich and 

complex. It includes not only the territorial assemblage but also assem-

bled, territorialized functions. Take the Troglodytidae, the wren family: 

the male takes possession of his territory and produces a "music box 

refrain" as a warning to possible intruders; he builds his own nests in his 

territory, sometimes as many as a dozen; when a female arrives, he sits in 

front of a nest, invites her to visit, hangs his wings, and lowers the inten-

sity of his song, reduced to a mere trill.

22

 It seems that the nesting function 

is highly territorialized, since the nests are prepared by the male alone 

before the arrival of the female, who only visits and completes them; the 

"courtship" function is also territorialized, but to a lesser degree, since 

the territorial refrain becomes seductive by changing in intensity. All 

kinds of heterogeneous elements show up in the intra-assemblage: not 

only the assemblage marks that group materials, colors, odors, sounds, 

postures, etc., but also the various elements of given assembled behaviors 

that enter into a motif. For example, a display behavior is composed of a 

dance, clicking of the beak, an exhibition of colors, a posture with neck 

outstretched, cries, smoothing of the feathers, bows, a refrain. .. The first 

question to be asked is what holds these territorializing marks, territorial 

motifs, and territorialized functions together in the same intra-assem-

blage. This is a question of consistency: the "holding together" of hetero-

geneous elements. At first, they constitute no more than a fuzzy set, a 

discrete set that later takes on consistency.

 

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But another question seems to interrupt or cut across the first one. For 

in many cases, a territorialized, assembled function acquires enough 

independence to constitute a new assemblage, one that is more or less 

deterritorialized, en route to deterritorialization. There is no need to 

effectively leave the territory to go this route; but what just a minute ago 

was a constituted function in the territorial assemblage has become the 

constituting element of another assemblage, the element of passage to 

another assemblage. As in courtly love, a color ceases to be territorial and 

enters a "courtship" assemblage. The territorial assemblage opens onto 

the courtship assemblage, which is a social assemblage that has gained 

autonomy. That is what happens when it is specifically the sexual partner 

or the members of a group that are recognized, rather than the territory: 

The partner is then said to be a Tier mit der Heimvalenz, "an animal with 

home value." There is therefore a distinction to be made between milieu 

groups and couples (without individual recognition), territorial groups 

and couples (in which there is only recognition inside the territory), and 

finally social groups and love couples (when there is recognition indepen-

dent of place).

23

 Courtship, or the group, is no longer a part of the territorial 

assemblage; a courtship or group assemblage takes on autonomy— even 

though it may stay inside the territory. Conversely, in the new assemblage 

there is a reterritorialization on the member of the couple or members of 

the group that have-the-value-of (valence). This opening of the 

assemblage onto other assemblages can be analyzed in detail, and varies 

widely. For example, when the male does not make the nest and confines 

himself to transporting materials or mimicking the construction of a nest 

(as in Australian grass finches), he either courts the female holding a 

piece of stubble in his beak (genus Bathilda), uses the grass stem only in 

the initial stages of courtship or even beforehand (genera Aidemosyne and 
Lonchura), or pecks at the grass without offering it (genus Emblema).

24 

It 

could always be said that these "grass stem" behaviors are merely archa-

isms, or vestiges of nesting behavior. But the notion of behavior itself 

proves inadequate to this assemblage. For when the nest is no longer made 

by the male, nesting ceases to be a component of the territorial 

assemblage—it takes wing, so to speak, from the territory; furthermore, 

courtship, which now precedes nesting, itself becomes a relatively autono-

mous assemblage. In addition, the matter of expression, "grass stem," acts 

as a component of passage between the territorial assemblage and the 

courtship assemblage. The fact that the grass stem has an increasingly 

rudimentary function in certain species, the fact that it tends to cancel out 

in the series under consideration, is not enough to make it a vestige, much 

less a symbol. A matter of expression is never a vestige or a symbol. The 

grass stem is a deterritorialized component, or one en route to

 

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OF THE REFRAIN □ 325

 

deterritorialization. It is neither an archaism nor a transitional or 

part-object. It is an operator, a vector. It is an assemblage converter. The 

stem cancels out precisely because it is a component of passage from one 

assemblage to another. This viewpoint is confirmed by the fact that if the 

stem cancels out, another relay component replaces it or assumes greater 

importance, namely, the refrain, which is not only territorial but becomes 

amorous and social, and changes accordingly.

25

 The question of why, in the 

constitution of new assemblages, the sound component "refrain" has a 

stronger valence than the gestural component "grass stem" can be consid-

ered only later on. The important thing for now is to note this formation of 

new assemblages within the territorial assemblage, and this movement 

from the intra-assemblage to interassemblages by means of components of 

passage and relay: An innovative opening of the territory onto the female, 

or the group. Selective pressure proceeds by way of interassemblages. It is 

as though forces of deterritorialization affected the territory itself, causing 

us to pass from the territorial assemblage to other types of assemblages 

(courtship or sexuality assemblages, group or social assemblages). The 

grass stem and the refrain are two agents of these forces, two agents of 

deterritorialization.

 

The territorial assemblage continually passes into other assemblages. 

Likewise, the infra-assemblage is inseparable from the intra-assemblage, 

as is the intra-assemblage from interassemblages; yet these passages are 

not necessary but rather take place "on a case-by-case basis." The reason 

is simple: the intra-assemblage, the territorial assemblage, territorializes func-

tions and forces (sexuality, aggressiveness, gregariousness, etc.), and in 

the process of territorializing them, transforms them. But these 

territorialized functions and forces can suddenly take on an autonomy 

that makes them swing over into other assemblages, compose other 

deterritorialized assemblages. In the intra-assemblage, sexuality may 

appear as a territorialized function, but it can just as easily draw a line of 

deterritorialization that describes another assemblage; there are therefore 

quite variable relations between sexuality and the territory, as if sexuality 

were keeping "its distance." Profession, trade, and specialty imply 

territorialized activities, but they can also take wing from the territory, 

building a new assemblage around themselves, and between professions. 

A territorial or territorialized component may set about budding, pro-

ducing: this is the case for the refrain, so much so that we should perhaps 

call all cases of this kind refrains. This ambiguity between the territory 

and deterritorialization is the ambiguity of the Natal. It is understood 

much more clearly if it is borne in mind that the territory has an intense 

center at its profoundest depths; but as we have seen, this intense center 

can be located outside the territory, at the point of convergence of very

 

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different and very distant territories. The Natal is outside. We may cite a 

certain number of troubling and well-known, more or less mysterious, 

cases illustrating prodigious takeoffs from the territory, displaying a vast 

movement of deterritorialization directly plugged into the territories and 

permeating them through and through: (1) pilgrimages to the source, as 

among salmon; (2) supernumerary assemblies, such as those of locusts or 

chaffinches, etc. (tens of millions of chaffinches near Thoune in 

1950-1951); (3) magnetic or solar-guided migrations; (4) long marches, 

such as those of the lobsters.

26

 

Whatever the causes of each of these movements, it is clear that the 

nature of the movement is different. It is no longer adequate to say that 

there is interassemblage, passage from a territorial assemblage to another 

type of assemblage; rather, we should say that one leaves all assemblages 

behind, that one exceeds the capacities of any possible assemblage, enter-

ing another plane. In effect, there is no longer a milieu movement or 

rhythm, nor a territorialized or territorializing movement or rhythm; there 

is something of the Cosmos in these more ample movements. The localiza-

tion mechanisms are still extremely precise, but the localization has 

become cosmic. These are no longer territorialized forces bundled together 

as forces of the earth; they are the liberated or regained forces of a 

deterritorialized Cosmos. In migration, the sun is no longer the terrestrial 

sun reigning over a territory, even an aerial one; it is the celestial sun of the 

Cosmos, as in the two Jerusalems, the Apocalypse. Leaving aside these two 

grandiose cases where deterritorialization becomes absolute while losing 

nothing of its precision (because it weds cosmic variables), we must remark 

that the territory is constantly traversed by movements of deterrito-

rialization that are relative and may even occur in place, by which one 

passes from the intra-assemblage to interassemblages, without, however, 

leaving the territory or issuing from the assemblages in order to wed the 

Cosmos. A territory is always en route to an at least potential deterrito-

rialization, even though the new assemblage may operate a 

reterritoriali-zation (something that "has-the-value-of' home). We saw that 

the territory constituted itself on a margin of decoding affecting the milieu; 

we now see that there is a margin of deterritorialization affecting the 

territory itself. There is a series of unclaspings. The territory is 

inseparable from certain coefficients of deterritorialization (which can be 

evaluated in each case) that place the relations of each territorialized 

function to the territory in variation, as well as the relations of the 

territory to each deterritorialized assemblage. It is the same "thing" that 

appears first as a territorialized function taken up in the intra-assemblage, 

and again as a deterritorialized or autonomous assemblage, as an 

interassemblage.

 

Refrains could accordingly be classified as follows: (1) territorial

 

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refrains that seek, mark, assemble a territory; (2) territorialized function 

refrains that assume a special function in the assemblage (the Lullaby that 

territorializes the child's slumber, the Lover's Refrain that territorializes 

the sexuality of the loved one, the Professional Refrain that territorializes 

trades and occupations, the Merchant Refrain that territorializes distribu-

tion and products); (3) the same, when they mark new assemblages, pass 

into new assemblages by means of deterritorialization-reterritorialization 

(nursery rhymes are a very complicated example: they are territorial 

refrains that are sung differently from neighborhood to neighborhood, 

sometimes from one street to the next; they distribute game roles and func-

tions within the territorial assemblage; but they also cause the territory to 

pass into the game assemblage, which tends to become autonomous);

27

 (4) 

refrains that collect or gather forces, either at the heart of the territory, or in 

order to go outside it (these are refrains of confrontation or departure that 

sometimes bring on a movement of absolute deterritorialization: 

"Goodbye, I'm leaving and I won't look back." At infinity, these refrains 

must rejoin the songs of the Molecules, the newborn wailing of the funda-

mental Elements, as Millikan put it. They cease to be terrestrial, becoming 

cosmic: when the religious Nome blooms and dissolves in a molecular pan-

theist Cosmos, when the singing of the birds is replaced by combinations of 

water, wind, clouds, and fog. "Outside, the wind and the rain ..." The Cos-

mos as an immense deterritorialized refrain).

 

The problem of consistency concerns the manner in which the compo-

nents of a territorial assemblage hold together. But it also concerns the 

manner in which different assemblages hold together, with components of 

passage and relay. It may even be the case that consistency finds the totality 

of its conditions only on a properly cosmic plane, where all the disparate 

and heterogeneous elements are convoked. However, from the moment 

heterogeneities hold together in an assemblage or interassemblages a prob-

lem of consistency is posed, in terms of coexistence or succession, and both 

simultaneously. Even in a territorial assemblage, it may be the most deter-

ritorialized component, the deterritorializing vector, in other words, the 

refrain, that assures the consistency of the territory. If we ask the general 

question, "What holds things together?", the clearest, easiest answer seems 

to be provided by a formalizing, linear, hierarchized, centralized 
arborescent model. Take Tinbergen's schema, which presents a coded link-

age of spatiotemporal forms in the central nervous system: a higher func-

tional center goes automatically into operation and releases an appetitive 

behavior in search of specific stimuli (the migrational center); through the 

intermediary of the stimulus, a second center that had been inhibited up to 

this point is freed and releases a new appetitive behavior (the territorial 

center); then other subordinate centers are activated, centers of fighting,

 

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nesting, courtship . . . until stimuli are found that release the correspond-

ing executive acts.

28

 This kind of representation, however, is constructed of 

oversimplified binarities: inhibition-release, innate-acquired, etc. 

Etholo-gists have a great advantage over ethnologists: they did not fall 

into the structural danger of dividing an undivided "terrain" into forms of 

kinship, politics, economics, myth, etc. The ethologists have retained the 

integrality of a certain undivided "terrain." But by orienting it along the 

axes of inhibition-release, innate-acquired, they risk reintroducing souls 

and centers at each locus and stage of linkage. That is why even the 

authors who stress the role of the peripheral and the acquired at the level 

of releasing stimuli do not truly overturn the linear aborescent schema, 

even if they reverse the direction of the arrows.

 

It seems more important to us to underline a certain number of factors 

liable to suggest an entirely different schema, one favoring rhizomatic, 

rather than arborified, functioning, and no longer operating by these dual-

isms. First of all, what is called a functional center brings into play not only 

a localization but also a distribution of an entire population of neurons 

selected from throughout the central nervous system, as in a "cable net-

work." This being the case, in considering the system as a whole we should 

speak less of automatism of a higher center than of coordination between 

centers, and of the cellular groupings or molecular populations that per-

form these couplings: there is no form or correct structure imposed from 

without or above but rather an articulation from within, as if oscillating 

molecules, oscillators, passed from one heterogeneous center to another, if 

only for the purpose of assuring the dominance of one among them.

29

 This 

obviously excludes any linear relation from one center to another, in favor 

of packets of relations steered by molecules: the interaction or coordina-

tion may be positive or  negative (release or inhibition), but it is never 

direct, as in a linear relation or chemical reaction; it always occurs between 

molecules with at least two heads, and each center taken separately.

30

 

This represents a whole behavioral-biological "machinics," a whole 

molecular engineering that should help increase our understanding of the 

nature of problems of consistency. The philosopher Eugene Dupreel pro-

posed a theory of consolidation; he demonstrated that life went not from a 

center to an exteriority but from an exterior to an interior, or rather from a 

discrete or fuzzy aggregate to its consolidation. This implies three things. 

First, that there is no beginning from which a linear sequence would derive, 

but rather densifications, intensifications, reinforcements, injections, 

showerings, like so many intercalary events ("there is growth only by inter-

calation"). Second, and this is not a contradiction, there must be an 

arrangement of intervals, a distribution of inequalities, such that it is 

sometimes necessary to make a hole in order to consolidate. Third, there is

 

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a superposition of disparate rhythms, an articulation from within of an 

interrhythmicity, with no imposition of meter or cadence.

31

 Consolidation 

is not content to come after; it is creative. The fact is that the beginning 

always begins in-between, intermezzo. Consistency is the same as consoli-

dation, it is the act that produces consolidated aggregates, of succession as 

well as of coexistence, by means of the three factors just mentioned: inter-

calated elements, intervals, and articulations of superposition. Architec-

ture, as the art of the abode and the territory, attests to this: there are 

consolidations that are made afterward, and there are consolidations of the 

keystone type that are constituent parts of the ensemble. More recently, 

matters like reinforced concrete have made it possible for the architectural 

ensemble to free itself from arborescent models employing tree-pillars, 

branch-beams, foliage-vaults. Not only is concrete a heterogeneous matter 

whose degree of consistency varies according to the elements in the mix, 

but iron is intercalated following a rhythm; moreover, its self-supporting 
surfaces 
form a complex rhythmic personage whose "stems" have different 

sections and variable intervals depending on the intensity and direction of 

the force to be tapped (armature instead of structure). In this sense, the lit-

erary or musical work has an architecture: "Saturate every atom," as Vir-

ginia Woolf said;

32

 or in the words of Henry James, it is necessary to "begin 

far away, as far away as possible," and to proceed by "blocks of wrought 

matter." It is no longer a question of imposing a form upon a matter but of 

elaborating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap 

increasingly intense forces. What makes a material increasingly rich is the 

same as what holds heterogeneities together without their ceasing to be het-

erogeneous. What holds them together in this way are intercalary oscilla-

tors, synthesizers with at least two heads; these are interval analyzers, 

rhythm synchronizers (the word "synchronizer" is ambiguous because 

molecular synchronizers do not proceed by homogenizing and equalizing 

measurement, but operate from within, between two rhythms). Is not con-

solidation the terrestrial name for consistency? The territorial assemblage 

is a milieu consolidation, a space-time consolidation, of coexistence and 

succession. And the refrain operates with these three factors.

 

The matters of expression themselves must present characteristics mak-

ing this taking on of consistency possible. We have seen that they have an 

aptitude to enter into internal relations forming motifs and counterpoints: 

the territorializing marks become territorial motifs or counterpoints, the 

signatures and placards constitute a "style." These are the elements of a 

discrete or fuzzy aggregate; but they become consolidated, take on consis-

tency. To this extent, they have effects, such as reorganizing functions and 

gathering forces. To get a better grasp on the mechanism of this aptitude, 

we may lay down certain conditions of homogeneity, beginning with marks

 

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or matters of the same kind, for example, a set of sonorous marks, the song 

of a bird. The song of the chaffinch normally has three distinct phases: the 

first has from four to fourteen notes rising in crescendo but decreasing in 

frequency; the second has from two to eight notes, lower than the first and 

of constant frequency; the third ends with a complex "flourish" or "orna-

ment." From the standpoint of acquisition, this "full song" is preceded by a 

"subsong" that under normal conditions already assumes possession of the 

general tonal quality, overall duration and content of the stanzas, and even 

a tendency to end on a higher note.

33

 But the organization into three stan-

zas, the order of the stanzas, the details and the ornament, are not pregiven; 

it is precisely the articulations from within that are missing, the intervals, 

the intercalary notes, everything making for motif and counterpoint. The 

distinction between subsong and full song could thus be presented as fol-

lows: the subsong as mark or placard, the full song as style or motif, and the 

aptitude to pass from one to the other, for one to consolidate itself in the 

other. Clearly, artificial isolation will have very different effects depending 

on whether it takes place before or after the acquisition of the components 

ofthe subsong.

 

Our present concern, however, is to find out what happens when these 

components effectively develop into the motifs and counterpoints of the 

full song. We must leave behind the conditions of qualitative homogeneity 

we set for ourselves. For as long as we confine ourselves to marks, marks of 

one kind coexist with marks of another kind, period: the sounds of an ani-

mal coexist with its colors, gestures, silhouettes; or else the sounds of a 

given species coexist with the sounds of other species, perhaps quite differ-

ent but close in space. The organization of qualified marks into motifs and 

counterpoints necessarily entails a taking on of consistency, or a capture of 

the marks of another quality, a mutual branching of 

sounds-colors-gestures, or a capture of sounds from different animal 

species, etc. Consistency necessarily occurs between heterogeneities, not 

because it is the birth of a differentiation, but because heterogeneities that 

were formerly content to coexist or succeed one another become bound up 

with one another through the "consolidation" of their coexistence and 

succession. The intervals, intercalations, and articulations constitutive of 

motifs and counterpoints in the order of an expressive quality also envelop 

other qualities of a different order, or qualities of the same order but of 

another sex or even another species of animal. A color will "answer to" a 

sound. If a quality has motifs and counterpoints, if there are rhythmic 

characters and melodic landscapes in a given order, then there is the 

constitution of a veritable machinic opera tying together orders, species, 

and heterogeneous qualities. What we term machinic is precisely this 

synthesis of heterogeneities as such. Inasmuch as these heterogeneities are 

matters of expression, we say

 

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that their synthesis itself, their consistency or capture, forms a properly 

machinic "statement" or "enunciation." The varying relations into which 

a color, sound, gesture, movement, or position enters in the same species, 

and in different species, form so many machinic enunciations.

 

Let us return to the stagemaker, the magic bird or bird of the opera. He is 

not brightly colored (as though there were an inhibition). But his song, his 

refrain, can be heard from a great distance (is this a compensation, or on 

the contrary the prime factor?). He sings perched on his singing stick, a 

vine or branch located just above the display ground he has prepared by 

marking it with cut leaves turned upside down to contrast with the color of 

the earth. As he sings, he uncovers the yellow root of certain feathers under-

neath his beak: he makes himself visible at the same time as sonorous. His 

song forms a varied and complex motif interweaving his own notes and 

those of other birds that he imitates in the intervals.

34

 This produces a con-

solidation that "consists" in species-specific sounds, sounds of other spe-

cies, leaf hue, throat color: the stagemaker's machinic statement or 

assemblage of enunciation. Many birds "imitate" the songs of other spe-

cies. But imitation may not be the best concept for these phenomena, 

which vary according to the assemblage into which they enter. The subsong 

contains elements that can enter into melodic and rhythmic organizations 

distinct from those of the species under consideration, supplying the full 

song with truly alien or added notes. If certain birds such as the chaffinch 

seem impervious to imitation, it is because any alien sounds appearing in 

their subsong are eliminated from the consistency of the full song. On the 

other hand, in cases where added phrases do get included in the full song, it 

may be because there is an interspecific assemblage of the parasitism type; 

or it may be because the bird's assemblage itself effectuates the counter-

points to its melody. Thorpe is not wrong to say that the problem is one of 

the occupation of frequency bands, as with radios (the sound aspect of ter-

ritoriality).

35

 It is less a question of imitating a song than of occupying cor-

responding frequencies; for there may be an advantage in being able to 

restrict oneself to a very determinate zone in some circumstances, and in 

others to widen or deepen the zone to assure oneself counterpoints and to 

invent chords that would otherwise remain diffuse, as, for example, in the 

rain forest, which is precisely where the greatest number of "imitative" 

birds are found.

 

From the standpoint of consistency, matters of expression must be con-

sidered not only in relation to their aptitude to form motifs and counter-

points but also in relation to the inhibitors and releasers that act on them, 

and the mechanisms of innateness or learning, heredity or acquisition, that 

modulate them. Ethology's mistake is to restrict itself to a binary distri-

bution of these factors, even, and especially, when it is thought necessary to

 

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take both into account simultaneously, to intermix them at every level of a 

"tree of behaviors." Instead, what should be done is to start from a positive 

notion capable of accounting for the very particular character the innate 

and the acquired assume in the rhizome, and which is like the principle of 

their mixture. Such a notion cannot be arrived at in terms of behavior but 

rather only in terms of assemblage. Some authors emphasize autonomous 

developments encoded in centers (innateness); others emphasize acquired 

linkages regulated by peripheral sensations (learning). But Raymond 

Ruyer has demonstrated that the animal is instead prey to "musical 

rhythms" and "melodic and rhythmic themes" explainable neither as the 

encoding of a recorded phonograph disk nor by the movements of per-

formance that effectuate them and adapt them to the circumstances.

36

 The 

opposite is even true: the melodic or rhythmic themes precede their per-

formance and recording. What is primary is the consistency of a refrain, a 

little tune, either in the form of a mnemic melody that has no need to be 

inscribed locally in a center, or in the form of a vague motif with no need to 

be pulsed or stimulated. There is perhaps more to be learned from a musi-

cal and poetic notion such as the Natal—in the lied, or in Holderlin or 

Thomas Hardy—than from the slightly vapid and foggy categories of the 

innate and the acquired. For from the moment there is a territorial assem-

blage, we can say that the innate assumes a very particular figure, since it is 

inseparable from a movement of decoding and passes to the margins of the 

code, unlike the innate of the interior milieu; acquisition also assumes a 

very particular figure, since it is territorialized, in other words, regulated 

by matters of expression rather than by stimuli in the exterior milieu. The 

natal is the innate, but decoded; and it is the acquired, but territorialized. 

The natal is the new figure assumed by the innate and the acquired in the 

territorial assemblage. The affect proper to the natal, as heard in the lied: to 

be forever lost, or refound, or aspiring to the unknown homeland. In the 

natal, the innate tends to be displaced: as Ruyer says, it is in some way prior 
to 
or downstream from the act; it concerns less the act or the behavior than 

the matters of expression themselves, the perception that discerns and 

selects them, and the gesture that erects them, or itself constitutes them 

(that is why there are "critical periods" when the animal valorizes an object 

or situation, "is impregnated" by a matter of expression, long before being 

able to perform the corresponding act). This is not to say, however, that 

behavior is at the mercy of chance learning; for it is predetermined by this 

displacement, and finds rules of assemblage in its own territorialization. 

The natal, then, consists in a decoding of innateness and a territo-

rialization of learning, one atop the other, one alongside the other. The 

natal has a consistency that cannot be explained as a mixture of the innate 

and the acquired, because it is instead what accounts for such mixtures in

 

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territorial assemblage and interassemblages. In short, the notion of behav-

ior proves inadequate, too linear, in comparison with that of the assem-

blage. The natal stretches from what happens in the intra-assemblage all 

the way to the center that has been projected outside; it cuts across all the 

interassemblages and reaches all the way to the gates of the Cosmos.

 

The territorial assemblage is inseparable from lines or coefficients of 

deterritorialization, passages, and relays toward other assemblages. There 

have been many studies on the influence of artificial conditions on bird 

song, but the results vary both by species and according to the kind and 

timing of the artifice. Many birds are receptive to the songs of other spe-

cies, if they are exposed to them during the critical period, and will repro-

duce the alien songs later on. The chaffinch, however, seems much more 

devoted to its own matters of expression and retains an innate sense of its 

own tonal quality even if exposed to synthetic sounds. The outcome also 

depends on whether the birds are isolated before or after the critical period. 

In the first case, chaffinches develop a nearly normal song; in the second, 

the subjects in the isolated group (who cannot hear each other) develop an 

abnormal, nonspecies-specific song that is nevertheless common to the 

group (see Thorpe). In any event, it is necessary to consider the effects of 

deterritorialization or denatalization on a given species at a given moment. 

Whenever a territorial assemblage is taken up by a movement that 

deterritorializes it (whether under so-called natural or artificial condi-

tions), we say that a machine is released. That in fact is the distinction we 

would like to propose between machine and assemblage: a machine is like a 

set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing 

deterritorialization, and draw variations and mutations of it. For there are 

no mechanical effects; effects are always machinic, in other words, depend 

on a machine that is plugged into an assemblage and has been freed 

through deterritorialization. What we call machinic statements are 

machine effects that define consistency or enter matters of expression. 

Effects of this kind can be very diverse but are never symbolic or imagi-

nary; they always have a real value of passage or relay.

 

As a general rule, a machine plugs into the territorial assemblage of a 

species and opens it to other assemblages, causes it to pass through the 

interassemblages of that species; for example, the territorial assemblage of 

a bird species opens onto interassemblages of courtship and 

gregar-iousness, moving in the direction of the partner or "socius." But 

the machine may also open the territorial assemblage to interspecific 

assemblages, as in the case of birds that adopt alien songs, and most 

especially in the case of parasitism.

37

 Or it may go beyond all assemblages 

and produce an opening onto the Cosmos. Or, conversely, instead of 

opening up the deterritorialized assemblage onto something else, it may 

produce an effect

 

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of closure, as if the aggregate had fallen into and continues to spin in a kind 

of black hole. This is what happens under conditions of precocious or 

extremely sudden deterritorialization, and when specific, interspecific, 

and cosmic paths are blocked; the machine then produces "individual" 

group effects spinning in circles, as in the case of chaffinches that have been 

isolated too early, whose impoverished, simplified song expresses nothing 

more than the resonance of the black hole in which they are trapped. It is 

important to bring up this "black hole" function again because it can 

increase our understanding of phenomena of inhibition, and is in turn 

capable of breaking with the overnarrow inhibitor-releaser dualism. We 

saw earlier that an interassemblage could include lines of impoverishment 

and fixation leading to a black hole but could still perhaps lead into a richer 

and more positive line of deterritorialization (for example, the "grass 

stem" component among Australian grass finches falls into a black hole 

and leads into the "refrain" component).

38

 Thus the black hole is a 

machine effect in assemblages and has a complex relation to other effects. 

It may be necessary for the release of innovative processes that they first 

fall into a catastrophic black hole: stases of inhibition are associated with 

the release of crossroads behaviors. On the other hand, when black holes 

resonate together or inhibitions conjugate and echo each other, instead of 

an opening onto consistency, we see a closure of the assemblage, as though 

it were deterritorialized in the void: young chaffinches. Machines are 
always singular keys that open or close an assemblage, a territory. 
More-

over, finding the machine in operation in a given territorial assemblage is 

not enough; it is already in operation in the emergence of matters of expres-

sion, in other words, in the constitution of the assemblage and in the vec-

tors of deterritorialization that ply it from the start.

 

Thus consistency of matters of expression relates, on the one hand, to 

their aptitude to form melodic and rhythmic themes and, on the other 

hand, to the power of the natal. Finally, there is one other aspect: their very 

special relation to the molecular (the machine starts us down this road). 

The very words, "matters of expression," imply that expression has a pri-

mary relation to matter. As matters of expression take on consistency they 

constitute semiotic systems, but the semiotic components are inseparable 

from  material  components and are in exceptionally close contact with 

molecular levels. The whole question is thus whether or not the 

molar-molecular relation assumes a new figure here. In general, it has been 

possible to distinguish "molar-molecular" combinations that vary greatly 

depending on the direction followed. First, individual atoms can enter into 

probabilistic or statistical accumulations that tend to efface their individu-

ality; this already happens on the level of the molecule, and then again in 

the molar aggregate. But they can become complicated in interactions and

 

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OF THE REFRAIN D 335

 

retain their individuality inside the molecule, then in the macromolecule, 

etc., setting up direct communications between individuals of different 

orders.

39

 Second, it is clear that the distinction to be made is not between 

the individual and the statistical. In fact, it is always a question of popula-

tions; statistics concerns individual phenomena, and antistatistical indi-

viduality operates only in relation to molecular populations. The distinc-

tion is between two group movements, as in Alembert's equation, in which 

one group tends toward increasingly equilibrated, homogeneous, and 

probable states (the divergent wave and the delayed potential), and the 

other group tends toward less probable states of concentration (the conver-

gent wave and the anticipated potential).

40

 Third, the intramolecular inter-

nal forces that give an aggregate its molar form can be of two types: they are 

either covalent, arborescent, mechanical, linear, localizable relations sub-

ject to chemical conditions of action and reaction or to linked reactions, or 

they are indirect, noncovalent, machinic and nonmechanical, superlinear, 

nonlocalizable bonds operating by stereospecific discernment or discrimi-
nation, 
rather than by linkage.

41

 

These are different ways of stating the same distinction, which seems 

much broader than the one we are looking for: it is, in effect, a distinction 

between matter and life, or rather, since there is only one matter, between 

two states, two tendencies of atomic matter (for example, there are bonds 

that immobilize the linked atoms in relation to one another, and other 

bonds that allow free rotation). Stating the distinction in the most general 

way, we could say that it is between stratified systems or systems of stratifi-

cation on the one hand, and consistent, self-consistent aggregates on the 

other. But the point is that consistency, far from being restricted to com-

plex life forms, fully pertains even to the most elementary atoms and parti-

cles. There is a coded system of stratification whenever, horizontally, there 

are linear causalities between elements; and, vertically, hierarchies of order 

between groupings; and, holding it all together in depth, a succession of 

framing forms, each of which informs a substance and in turn serves as a 

substance for another form. These causalities, hierarchies, and framings 

constitute a stratum, as well as the passage from one stratum to another, 

and the stratified combinations of the molecular and molar. On the other 

hand, we may speak of aggregates of consistency when instead of a regu-

lated succession of forms-substances we are presented with consolidations 

of very heterogeneous elements, orders that have been short-circuited or 

even reverse causalities, and captures between materials and forces of a dif-

ferent nature: as if a machinic phylum, a destratifying transversality, moved 

through elements, orders, forms and substances, the molar and the molec-

ular, freeing a matter and tapping forces.

 

Now if we ask ourselves where life fits into this distinction, we see that it

 

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undoubtedly implies a gain in consistency, in other words, a surplus value 

(surplus value of destratificatiori). For example, it contains a greater num-

ber of self-consistent aggregates and processes of consolidation and gives 

them molar scope. It is destratifying from the outset, since its code is not 

distributed throughout the entire stratum but rather occupies an eminently 

specialized genetic line. But the question is almost contradictory, because 

asking where life fits in amounts to treating it as a particular stratum 

having its own order and befitting order, having its own forms and sub-

stances. It is true that it is both at once: a particularly complex system of 

stratification and an aggregate of consistency that disrupts orders, forms, 

and substances. As we have seen, the living thing performs a transcoding of 

milieus that can be considered both to constitute a stratum and to effect 

reverse causalities and transversals of destratification. The same question 

can be asked when life no longer restricts itself to mixing milieus but 

assembles territories as well. The territorial assemblage implies a decoding 

and is inseparable from its own deterritorialization (two new types of sur-

plus value). "Ethology" then can be understood as a very privileged molar 

domain for demonstrating how the most varied components (biochemical, 

behavioral, perceptive, hereditary, acquired, improvised, social, etc.) can 

crystallize in assemblages that respect neither the distinction between 

orders nor the hierarchy of forms. What holds all the components together 

are  transversals,  and the transversal itself is only a component that has 

taken upon itself the specialized vector of deterritorialization. In effect, 

what holds an assemblage together is not the play of framing forms or linear 

causalities but, actually or potentially, its most deterritorialized compo-

nent, a cutting edge of deterritorialization. An example is the refrain: it is 

more deterritorialized than the grass stem, but this does not preclude its 

being "determined," in other words, connected to biochemical and molec-

ular components. The assemblage holds by its most deterritorialized com-

ponent, but deterritorialized is not the same as indeterminate (the refrain 

may be narrowly connected to the presence of male hormones).

42

 A compo-

nent of this kind entering an assemblage may be among the most highly 

determined, even mechanized, of components, but it will still bring "play" 

to what it composes; it fosters the entry of new dimensions of the milieus by 

releasing processes of discernibility, specialization, contraction, and accel-

eration that open new possibilities, that open the territorial assemblage 

onto interassemblages. Back to the stagemaker: one of its acts consists in 

discerning and causing to be discerned both sides of the leaf. This act is 

connected to the determinism of the "toothed" beak. Assemblages are 

defined simultaneously by matters of expression that take on consistency 

independently of the form-substance relation; reverse causalities or 

"advanced" determinisms, decoded innate functions related to acts ofdis-

 

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cernment or election rather than to linked reactions; and molecular combi-
nations  
that proceed by noncovalent bonding rather than by linear 

relations—in short, a new "pace" produced by the imbrication of the 
semiotic and the material. From this standpoint, we may oppose the con-

sistency of assemblages to the stratification of milieus. But once again, this 

opposition is only relative, entirely relative. Just as milieus swing between 

a stratum state and a movement of destratification, assemblages swing 

between a territorial closure that tends to restratify them and a 

deterrito-rializing movement that on the contrary connects them with the 

Cosmos. Thus it is not surprising that the distinction we were seeking 

was not between assemblages and something else but between the two 

limits of any possible assemblage, in other words, between the system of 

strata and the plane of consistency. We should not forget that the strata 

rigidify and are organized on the plane of consistency, and that the plane 

of consistency is at work and is constructed in the strata, in both cases 

piece by piece, blow by blow, operation by operation.

 

We have gone from stratified milieus to territorialized assemblages and 

simultaneously, from the forces of chaos, as broken down, coded, 

trans-coded by the milieus, to the forces of the earth, as gathered into the 

assemblages. Then we went from territorial assemblages to 

interassemblages, to' the opening of assemblages along lines of 

deterritorialization; and simultaneously, the same from the ingathered 

forces of the earth to the deterritorialized, or rather deterritorializing, 

Cosmos. How does Paul Klee present this last movement, which is not a 

terrestrial "pace" but instead a cosmic "breakaway" [echappee:  also 

"opening," "outlet," "vista"; in counterpoint, "escape tone"—Trans.]? And 

why so enormous a word, Cosmos, to discuss an operation that must be 

precise? Klee says that one "tries convulsively to fly from the earth," and 

that one "rises above it. . . powered by centrifugal forces that triumph over 

gravity." He adds that the artist begins by looking around him- or herself, 

into all the milieus, but does so in order to grasp the trace of creation in 

the created, of naturing nature in natured nature; then, adopting "an 

earthbound position,"

43

 the artist turns his or her attention to the 

microscopic, to crystals, molecules, atoms, and particles, not for 

scientific conformity, but for movement, for nothing but immanent 

movement; the artist tells him- or herself that this world has had different 

aspects, will have still others, and that there are already others on other 

planets; finally, the artist opens up to the Cosmos in order to harness forces 

in a "work" (without which the opening onto the Cosmos would only be a 

reverie incapable of enlarging the limits of the earth); this work requires 

very simple, pure, almost childish means, but also the forces of a people, 

which is what is still lacking. "We still lack the ultimate force....

 

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We seek a people. We began over there in the Bauhaus.... More we cannot 

do."

44

 

Classicism refers to form-matter relation, or rather a form-substance 

relation (substance is precisely a matter endowed with form). Matter is 

organized by a succession of forms that are compartmentalized, central-

ized, and hierarchized in relation to one another, each of which takes 

charge of a greater or lesser amount of matter. Each form is like the code of 

a milieu, and the passage from one form to another is a veritable 

transcoding. Even the seasons are milieus. Two coexistent operations are 

involved, one by which the form differentiates itself according to binary 

distinctions, the other by which the formed substantial parts, milieus or 

seasons, enter into an order of succession that can be the same in either 

direction. But beneath these operations, the classical artist hazards an 

extreme and dangerous adventure. He or she breaks down the milieus, 

separates them, harmonizes them, regulates their mixtures, passes from 

one to the other. What the artist confronts in this way is chaos, the forces 

of chaos, the forces of a raw and untamed matter upon which Forms must 

be imposed in order to make substances, and Codes in order to make 

milieus. Phenomenal agility. That is why no one has ever been able to 

draw a clear line between baroque and classical.

45

 All of baroque lies 

brewing beneath classicism: the task of the classical artist is God's own, 

that of organizing chaos; and the artist's only cry is Creation! Creation! 

The Tree of Creation! An ancient wooden flute organizes chaos, but chaos 

reigns like the Queen of the Night. The classical artist proceeds with a 

One-Two: the one-two of the differentiation of form divided 

(man-woman, masculine and feminine rhythms, voices, families of instru-

ments, all the binarities of the ars nova); and the one-two of the 

distinction between parts as they answer each other (the enchanted flute 

and the magic bell). The little tune, the bird refrain, is the binary unity of 

creation, the differentiating unity of the pure beginning: "At first the 

piano complained alone, like a bird deserted by its mate; the violin heard 

and answered it, as from a neighboring tree. It was as at the beginning of 

the world, as if there were as yet only the two of them on earth, or ratherin 

this world closed to all the rest, fashioned by the logic of a creator, in 

which there would never be more than the two of them: this sonata."

46

 

If we attempt an equally summary definition of romanticism, we see 

that everything is clearly different. A new cry resounds: the Earth, the terri-

tory and the Earth! With romanticism, the artist abandons the ambition of 

de jure universality and his or her status as creator: the artist territorializes, 

enters a territorial assemblage. The seasons are now territorialized. The 

earth is certainly not the same thing as the territory. The earth is the intense 

point at the deepest level of the territory or is projected outside it like a

 

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focal point, where all the forces draw together in close embrace. The earth 

is no longer one force among others, nor is it a substance endowed with 

form or a coded milieu, with bounds and an apportioned share. The earth 

has become that close embrace of all forces, those of the earth as well as of 

other substances, so that the artist no longer confronts chaos, but hell and 

the subterranean, the groundless. The artist no longer risks dissipation in 

the milieus but rather sinking too deeply into the earth: Empedocles. The 

artist no longer identifies with Creation but with the ground or foundation, 

the foundation has become creative. The artist is no longer God but the 

Hero who defies God: Found, Found, instead of Create. Faust, especially 

the second Faust, is impelled by this tendency. Criticism, the Protestant-

ism of the earth, replaces dogmatism, the Catholicism of the milieus 

(code). It is certain that the Earth as an intense point in depth or in projec-

tion, as ratio essendi, is always in disjunction with the territory; and the ter-

ritory as the condition of "knowledge," ratio cognoscendi, is always in 

disjunction with the earth. The territory is German, the Earth Greek. And 

this disjunction is precisely what determines the status of the romantic art-

ist, in that she or he no longer confronts the gaping of chaos but the pull of 

the Ground (Fond). The little tune, the bird refrain, has changed: it is no 

longer the beginning of a world but draws a territorial assemblage upon the 

earth. It is then no longer made of two consonant parts that seek and answer 

one another; it addresses itself to a deeper singing that founds it, but also 

strikes against it and sweeps it away, making it ring dissonant. The refrain is 

indissolubly constituted by the territorial song and the singing of the earth 

that rises to drown it out. Thus at the end of Das Lied von der Erde (The 

song of the Earth) there are two coexistent motifs, one melodic, evoking the 

assemblages of the bird, the other rhythmic, evoking the deep, eternal 

breathing of the earth. Mahler says that the singing of the birds, the color of 

the flowers, and the fragrance of the forest are not enough to make Nature, 

that the god Dionysus and the great Pan are needed. The Ur-refrain of the 

earth harnesses all refrains whether territorial or not, and all milieu 

refrains. By the end of [Berg's] Wozzeck,  the lullaby refrain, military 

refrain, drinking refrain, hunting refrain, child's refrain are so many admi-

rable assemblages swept up by the powerful earth machine and its cutting 

edges: Wozzeck's voice, by which the earth becomes sonorous, Marie's 

death cry moving over the pond, the repeated B note, when the earth 

howled ... It is owing to this disjunction, this decoding, that the romantic 

artist experiences the territory; but he or she experiences it as necessarily 

lost, and experiences him- or herself as an exile, a voyager, as 

deterrito-rialized, driven back into the milieus, like the Flying Dutchman 

or King Waldemar (whereas the classical artist inhabited the milieus). Yet 

this movement is still under earth's command, the repulsion from the 

territory

 

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is produced by the attraction of the earth. The signpost now only indicates 

the road of no return. This is the ambiguity of the natal, as it appears in the 

lied (as well as in symphony and opera): the lied is simultaneously the terri-

tory, the lost territory, and the earth vector. The intermezzo assumed 

increasing importance because it played on all the disjunctions between 

the earth and the territory, inserted itself into them, filled them after its 

fashion, "between night and day," "noon-midnight." From this standpoint, 

the fundamental innovations of romanticism can be said to be the 

following: There were no longer substantial parts corresponding to forms, 

milieus corresponding to codes, or a matter in chaos given order in forms 

and by codes. The parts were instead like assemblages produced and dis-

mantled at the surface. Form itself became a great form in continuous devel-
opment, 
a gathering of the forces of the earth taking all the parts up into a 

sheaf. Matter itself was no longer a chaos to subjugate and organize but 

rather  the moving matter of a continuous variation. The universal had 

become a relation, variation. The continuous variation of matter and the 

continuous development of form. The assemblages thus placed matter and 

form in a new relation: matter ceased to be a matter of content, becoming 

instead a matter of expression, and form ceased to be a code subduing the 

forces of chaos, becoming a force itself, the sum of the forces of the earth. 

There was a new relation to danger, madness, limits: romanticism did not 

go further than baroque classicism; it went elsewhere, with other givens 

and other vectors.

 

What romanticism lacks most is a people. The territory is haunted by a 

solitary voice; the voice of the earth resonates with it and provides it per-

cussion rather than answering it. Even when there is a people, it is 

mediatized by the earth, it rises up from the bowels of the earth and is apt to 

return there: more a subterranean than a terrestrial people. The hero is a 

hero of the earth; he is mythic, rather than being a hero of the people and 

historical. Germany, German romanticism, had a genius for experiencing 

the natal territory not as deserted but as "solitary," regardless of popula-

tion density; for the population is only an emanation of the earth, and has 

the value of One Alone. The territory does not open onto a people, it 

half-opens onto the Friend, the Loved One; but the Loved One is already 

dead, and the Friend uncertain, disturbing.

47

 As in the lied, everything in the 

territory occurs in relation to the One-Alone of the soul and the One-All of 

the earth. That is why romanticism takes on an entirely different aspect 

and even claims a different name, a different placard, in the Latin and 

Slavic countries, where on the contrary everything is put in terms of the 

theme of a people and the forces of a people. This time, it is the earth that 

is mediatized by the people, and exists only through the people. This 

time, the earth can be "deserted," an arid steppe, or a ravaged, 

dismembered ter-

 

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ritory; yet it is never solitary, it is always filled by a nomadic population 

that divides or regroups, contests or laments, attacks or suffers. This time, 

the hero is a hero of the people, and not of the earth; her is related to the 
One-Crowd, not the One-All. It certainly cannot be said that there is more or 

less nationalism on one side or the other because nationalism is everywhere 

in the figures of romanticism, sometimes as the driving force, sometimes as 

a black hole (fascism used Verdi much less than nazism did Wagner). The 

problem is a truly musical one, technically musical, and all the more politi-

cal for that. The romantic hero, the voice of the romantic hero, acts as a 

subject, a subjectified individual with "feelings"; but this subjective vocal 

element is reflected in an orchestral and instrumental whole that on the 

contrary mobilizes nonsubjective "affects" and that reaches its height in 

romanticism. It should not be thought that the vocal element and the 

orchestral-instrumental whole are only in an extrinsic relation to one 

another: the orchestration imposes a given role on the voice, and the voice 

envelops a given mode of orchestration. Orchestration-instrumentation 

brings sound forces together or separates them, gathers or disperses them; 

but it changes, and the role of the voice changes too, depending on whether 

the forces are of the Earth or of the People, of the One-All or the 

One-Crowd. In the first case, it is a question of effecting grouping of powers, 

and these are what constitute affects; in the second case, it is group 
individuations  
that constitute affect and are the object of orchestration. 

Groupings of power are fully diversified, but they are like the relations 
proper to the Universal; 
we must use another word, the Dividual, to desig-

nate the type of musical relations and the intra- or intergroup passages 

occurring in group individuation. The sentimental or subjective element 

of the voice has a different role and even a different position depending on 

whether it internally confronts nonsubjectified groupings of power or 

nonsubjectified group individuation, the relations of the universal or the 

relations of the "dividual." Debussy formulated the problem of the 

One-Crowd well when he reproached Wagner for not knowing how to "do" 

a crowd or a people: a crowd must be fully individuated, but by group 

individuations that are not reducible to the individuality of the subjects 

that compose the crowd.

48

 The people must be individualized, not according 

to the persons within it, but according to the affects it experiences, 

simultaneously or successively. The concepts of the One-Crowd and the 

Dividual are botched if the people is reduced to a juxtaposition, or if it is 

reduced to a power of the universal. In short, there are two very different 

conceptions of orchestration, depending on whether one is seeking to 

sonorize the forces of the Earth or the forces of the People. The simplest 

example of this difference is doubtless Wagner-Verdi, in that Verdi puts 

increasing emphasis on the relations between the voice and instrumenta-

 

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tion and orchestration. Even today, Stockhausen and Berio outline a new 

version of this difference, even though they are grappling with a musical 

problem different from that of romanticism (in Berio there is a search for a 

multiple cry, a cry of the population, in the dividual of the One-Crowd, and 

not for a cry of the Earth in the universal of the One-All). The idea of an 

Opera of the world, or cosmic music, changes drastically depending on 

which pole of orchestration is in play.

49

 To avoid an oversimplified opposi-

tion between Wagner and Verdi, we would have to show how Berlioz had a 

genius for passing from one pole to the other in his orchestration, or even 

hesitating between them: a sonorous Nature or People. And how music like 

Mussorgsky's was able to do a crowd (despite what Debussy says). And how 

music like Bartok's was able to use popular, or population, airs to do popu-

lations, themselves sonorous, instrumental, and orchestral, which impose 

a Dividual scale, a prodigious new chromaticism.

50

 And then there are all 

the non-Wagnerian paths ...

 

If there is a modern age, it is, of course, the age of the cosmic. Paul Klee 

declared himself anti-Faustian. "As for animals and all the other creatures, 

I do not like them with a terrestrial cordiality; earthly things interest me 

less than cosmic things." The assemblage no longer confronts the forces of 

chaos, it no longer uses the forces of the earth or the people to deepen itself 

but instead opens onto the forces of the Cosmos. All this seems extremely 

general, and somewhat Hegelian, testifying to an absolute Spirit. Yet it is, 

should be, a question of technique, exclusively a question of technique. 

The essential relation is no longer matters-forms (or substances-attri-

butes); neither is it the continuous development of form and the continu-

ous variation of matter. It is now a direct relation material-forces.  

material is a molecularized matter, which must accordingly "harness" 

forces; these forces are necessarily forces of the Cosmos. There is no longer 

a matter that finds its corresponding principle of intelligibility in form. It is 

now a question of elaborating a material charged with harnessing forces of 

a different order: the visual material must capture nonvisible forces. Ren-
der visible, 
Klee said; not render or reproduce the visible. From this per-

spective, philosophy follows the same movement as the other activities; 

whereas romantic philosophy still appealed to a formal synthetic identity 

ensuring a continuous intelligibility of matter (a priori synthesis), modern 

philosophy tends to elaborate a material of thought in order to capture 

forces that are not thinkable in themselves. This is Cosmos philosophy, 

after the manner of Nietzsche. The molecular material has even become so 

deterritorialized that we can no longer even speak of matters of expression, 

as we did in romantic territoriality. Matters of expression are superseded by 
a material of capture. 
The forces to be captured are no longer those of the 

earth, which still constitute a great expressive Form, but the forces of an

 

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immaterial, nonformal, and energetic Cosmos. The painter Millet used to 

say that what counts in painting is not, for example, what a peasant is carry-

ing, whether it is a sacred object or a sack of potatoes, but its exact weight. 

This is the postromantic turning point: the essential thing is no longer 

forms and matters, or themes, but forces, densities, intensities. The earth 

itself swings over, tending to take on the value of pure material for a force of 

gravitation or weight. Perhaps it is not until Cezanne that rocks begin to 

exist uniquely through the forces of folding they harness, landscapes 

through thermal and magnetic forces, and apples through forces of germi-

nation: nonvisual forces that nevertheless have been rendered visible. 

When forces become necessarily cosmic, material becomes necessarily 

molecular, with enormous force operating in an infinitesimal space. The 

problem is no longer that of the beginning, any more than it is that of a 

foundation-ground. It is now a problem of consistency or consolidation: 

how to consolidate the material, make it consistent, so that it can harness 

unthinkable, invisible, nonsonorous forces. Debussy ... Music 

molecu-larizes sound matter and in so doing becomes capable of 

harnessing nonsonorous forces such as Duration and Intensity.

51

  Render 

Duration sonorous. Let us recall Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return as a 

little ditty, a refrain, but which captures the mute and unthinkable forces 

of the Cosmos. We thus leave behind the assemblages to enter the age of the 

Machine, the immense mechanosphere, the plane of cosmicization of 

forces to be harnessed. Varese's procedure, at the dawn of this age, is 

exemplary: a musical machine of consistency, a sound machine (not a 

machine for reproducing sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes, 

ionizes sound matter, and harnesses a cosmic energy.

52

 If this machine must 

have an assemblage, it is the synthesizer. By assembling modules, source 

elements, and elements for treating sound (oscillators, generators, and 

transformers), by arranging microintervals, the synthesizer makes audible 

the sound process itself, the production of that process, and puts us in 

contact with still other elements beyond sound matter.

53

 It unites disparate 

elements in the material, and transposes the parameters from one formula 

to another. The synthesizer, with its operation of consistency, has taken the 

place of the ground in a priori synthetic judgment: its synthesis is of the 

molecular and the cosmic, material and force, not form and matter, Grund 

and territory. Philosophy is no longer synthetic judgment; it is like a 

thought synthesizer functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, 

make it a force of the Cosmos (in the same way as one makes sound 

travel).

 

This synthesis of disparate elements is not without ambiguity. It has the 

same ambiguity, perhaps, as the modern valorization of children's draw-

ings, texts by the mad, and concerts of noise. Sometimes one overdoes it, 

puts too much in, works with a jumble of lines and sounds; then instead of

 

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producing a cosmic machine capable of "rendering sonorous," one lapses 

back to a machine of reproduction that ends up reproducing nothing but a 

scribble effacing all lines, a scramble effacing all sounds. The claim is that 

one is opening music to all events, all irruptions, but one ends up reproduc-

ing a scrambling that prevents any event from happening. All one has left is 

a resonance chamber well on the way to forming a black hole. A material 

that is too rich remains too "territorialized": on noise sources, on the 

nature of the objects ... (this even applies to Cage's prepared piano). One 

makes an aggregate fuzzy, instead of defining the fuzzy aggregate by the 

operations of consistency or consolidation pertaining to it. For this is the 

essential thing: a fuzzy aggregate, a synthesis of disparate elements, is 
defined only by a degree of consistency that makes it possible to distinguish 
the disparate elements constituting that aggregate (discernibility) 
,

54

 The 

material must be sufficiently deterritorialized to be molecularized and 

open onto something cosmic, instead of lapsing into a statistical heap. This 

condition is met only if there is a certain simplicity in the nonuniform 

material: a maximum of calculated sobriety in relation to the disparate ele-

ments and the parameters. The sobriety of the assemblages is what makes 

for the richness of the Machine's effects. People often have too much of a 

tendency to reterritorialize on the child, the mad, noise. If this is done, one 
fuzzifies instead of making the fuzzy aggregate consist, or harnessing cos-

mic forces in the deterritorialized material. That is why it infuriated Paul 

Klee when people would talk about the "childishness" of his drawings (and 

Varese when they would talk about sound effects, etc.). According to Klee, 

what is needed in order to "render visible" or harness the Cosmos is a pure 

and simple line accompanied by the idea of an object, and nothing more: if 

you multiply the lines and take the whole object, you get nothing but a 

scramble, and visual sound effects.

55

 According to Varese, in order for the 

projection to yield a highly complex form, in other words, a cosmic distri-

bution, what is necessary is a simple figure in motion and a plane that is 

itself mobile; otherwise, you get sound effects. Sobriety, sobriety: that is the 

common prerequisite for the deterritorialization of matters, the 

molecu-larization of material, and the cosmicization of forces. Maybe a 

child can do that. But the sobriety involved is the sobriety of a 

becoming-child that is not necessarily the becoming o/the child, quite the 

contrary; the becoming-mad involved is not necessarily the becoming of 

'the madman, quite the contrary. It is clear that what is necessary to make 

sound travel, and to travel around sound, is very pure and simple sound, 

an emission or wave without harmonics (La Monte Young has been 

successful at this). The more rarefied the atmosphere, the more disparate 

the elements you will find. Your synthesis of disparate elements will be all 

the  stronger  if you proceed with a sober gesture, an act of consistency, 

capture, or extraction that

 

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works in a material that is not meager but prodigiously simplified, crea-

tively limited, selected. For there is no imagination outside of technique. 

The modern figure is not the child or the lunatic, still less the artist, but the 

cosmic artisan: a homemade atomic bomb—it's very simple really, it's 

been proven, it's been done. To be an artisan and no longer an artist, cre-

ator, or founder, is the only way to become cosmic, to leave the milieus and 

the earth behind. The invocation to the Cosmos does not at all operate as a 

metaphor; on the contrary, the operation is an effective one, from the 

moment the artist connects a material with forces of consistency or 

consolidation.

 

Material thus has three principal characteristics: it is a molecularized 

matter; it has a relation to forces to be harnessed; and it is defined by the 

operations of consistency applied to it. Finally, it is clear that the relation to 

the earth and the people has changed, and is no longer of the romantic type. 

The earth is now at its most deterritorialized: not only a point in a galaxy, 

but one galaxy among others. The people is now at its most molecularized: 

a molecular population, a people of oscillators as so many forces of interac-

tion. The artist discards romantic figures, relinquishes both the forces of 

the earth and those of the people. The combat, if combat there is, has 

moved. The established powers have occupied the earth, they have built 

people's organizations. The mass media, the great people's organizations 

of the party or union type, are machines for reproduction, fuzzification 

machines that effectively scramble all the terrestrial forces of the people. 

The established powers have placed us in the situation of a combat at once 

atomic and cosmic, galactic. Many artists became aware of this situation 

long ago, even before it had been installed (Nietzsche, for example). They 

became aware of it because the same vector was traversing their own 

domain: a molecularization, an atomization of the material, coupled with 

a cosmicization of the forces taken up by that material. The question then 

became whether molecular or atomic "populations" of all natures (mass 

media, monitoring procedures, computers, space weapons) would con-

tinue to bombard the existing people in order to train it or control it or 

annihilate it—or if other molecular populations were possible, could slip 

into the first and give rise to a people yet to come. As Virilio says in his very 

rigorous analysis of the depopulation of the people and the 

deterrito-rialization of the earth, the question has become: "To dwell as a 

poet or as an assassin?"

56

 The assassin is one who bombards the existing 

people with molecular populations that are forever closing all of the 

assemblages, hurling them into an ever wider and deeper black hole. The 

poet, on the other hand, is one who lets loose molecular populations in 

hopes that this will sow the seeds of, or even engender, the people to 

come, that these populations will pass into a people to come, open a 

cosmos. Once again, we must

 

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not make it seem as though the poet gorged on metaphors: it may be that the 

sound molecules of pop music are at this very moment implanting here and 

there a people of a new type, singularly indifferent to the orders of the 

radio, to computer safeguards, to the threat of the atomic bomb. In this 

respect, the relation of artists to the people has changed significantly: the 

artist has ceased to be the One-Alone withdrawn into him- or herself, but 

has also ceased to address the people, to invoke the people as a constituted 

force. Never has the artist been more in need of a people, while stating most 

firmly that the people is lacking—the people is what is most lacking. We 

are not referring to popular or populist artists. Mallarme said that the Book 

needed a people. Kafka said that literature is the affair of the people. Klee 

said that the people is essential yet lacking. Thus the problem of the artist is 

that the modern depopulation of the people results in an open earth, and by 

means of art, or by means to which art contributes. Instead of being bom-

barded from all sides in a limiting cosmos, the people and the earth must be 

like the vectors of a cosmos that carries them off; then the cosmos itself will 

be art. From depopulation, make a cosmic people; from 

deterritorializa-tion, a cosmic earth—that is the wish of the artisan-artist, 

here, there, locally. Our governments deal with the molecular and the 

cosmic, and our arts make them their affair also, with the same stakes, the 

people and the earth, and with unfortunately incomparable, but 

nevertheless competitive, means. Is it not of the nature of creations to 

operate in silence, locally, to seek consolidation everywhere, to go from the 

molecular to an uncertain cosmos, whereas the processes of destruction 

and conservation work in bulk, take center stage, occupy the entire 

cosmos in order to enslave the molecular and to stick it in a conservatory 

or a bomb?

 

These three "ages," the classical, romantic, and modern (for lack of a 

better term), should not be interpreted as an evolution, or as structures sep-

arated by signifying breaks. They are assemblages enveloping different 

Machines, or different relations to the Machine. In a sense, everything we 

attribute to an age was already present in the preceding age. Forces, for 

example: it has always been a question of forces, designated either as forces 

of chaos or forces of the earth. Similarly, for all of time painting has had the 

project of rendering visible, instead of reproducing the visible, and music 

of rendering sonorous, instead of reproducing the sonorous. Fuzzy aggre-

gates have been constituting themselves and inventing their processes of 

consolidation all along. A freeing of the molecular was already found in 

classical matters of content, operating by destratification, and in romantic 

matters of expression, operating by decoding. The most we can say is that 

when forces appear as forces of the earth or of chaos, they are not grasped 

directly as forces but as reflected in relations between matter and form. 

Thus it is more a question of thresholds of perception, or thresholds of

 

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OF THE REFRAIN D 347

 

discernibility belonging to given assemblages. It is only after matter has 

been sufficiently deterritorialized that it itself emerges as molecular and 

brings forth pure forces attributable only to the Cosmos. It had been pres-

ent "for all of time," but under different perceptual conditions. New condi-

tions were necessary for what was buried or covered, inferred or con-

cluded, presently to rise to the surface. What was composed in an 

assemblage, what was still only composed, becomes a component of a new 

assemblage. In this sense, all history is really the history of perception, and 

what we make history with is the matter of a becoming, not the subject mat-

ter of a story. Becoming is like the machine: present in a different way in 

every assemblage, passing from one to the other, opening one onto the 

other, outside any fixed order or determined sequence.

 

We are now ready to return to the refrain. We can propose a new classifi-

cation system: milieu refrains, with at least two parts, one of which answers 

the other (the piano and the violin); natal refrains, refrains of the territory, 

where the part is related to the whole, to an immense refrain of the earth, 

according to relations that are themselves variable and mark in each 

instance the disjunction between the earth and the territory (the lullaby, 

the drinking song, hunting song, work song, military song, etc.); folk and 

popular refrains, themselves tied to an immense song of the people, 

according to variable relations of crowd individuations that simultane-

ously bring into play affects and nations (the Polish, Auvergnat, German, 

Magyar, or Romanian, but also the Pathetic, Panicked, Vengeful, etc.); 

molecularized refrains (the sea and the wind) tied to cosmic forces, the 

Cosmos refrain. For the Cosmos itself is a refrain, and the ear also (every-

thing that has been taken for a labyrinth is in fact a refrain). But precisely 

why is the refrain eminently sonorous? Why this privileging of the ear, 

when even animals and birds present us with so many visual, chromatic, 

postural, and gestural refrains? Does the painter have fewer refrains than 

the musician? Are there fewer refrains in Cezanne or Klee than in Mozart, 

Schumann, or Debussy? Taking Proust's examples: Does Vermeer's little 

yellow span of wall, or a painter's flowers, Elstir's roses, constitute less of a 

refrain than Vinteuil's little phrase? There is surely no question here of 

declaring a given art supreme on the basis of a formal hierarchy of absolute 

criteria. Our problem is more modest: comparing the powers or coeffi-

cients of deterritorialization of sonorous and visual components. It seems 

that when sound deterritorializes, it becomes more and more refined; it 

becomes specialized and autonomous. Color clings more, not necessarily 

to the object, but to territoriality. When it deterritorializes, it tends to 

dissolve, to let itself be steered by other components. This is evident in 

phenomena of synesthesia, which are not reducible to a simple color-sound 

correspondence; sounds have a piloting role and induce colors that are

 

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superposed  upon the colors we see, lending them a properly sonorous 

rhythm and movement.

57

 Sound owes this power not to signifying or 

"communicational" values (which on the contrary presuppose that pow-

er), nor to physical properties (which would privilege light over sound), 

but to a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound and 

makes it a cutting edge of deterritorialization. But this does not happen 

without great ambiguity: sound invades us, impels us, drags us, 

transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a 

black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. It makes us want to die. Since its 

force of deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects the most massive 

of reterritorializations, the most numbing, the most redundant. Ecstasy 

and hypnosis. Colors do not move a people. Flags can do nothing without 

trumpets. Lasers are modulated on sound. The refrain is sonorous par 

excellence, but it can as easily develop its force into a sickly sweet ditty as 

into the purest motif, or Vinteuil's little phrase. And sometimes the two 

combine: Beethoven used as a "signature tune." The potential fascism of 

music. Overall, we may say that music is plugged into a machinic phylum 

infinitely more powerful than that of painting: a line of selective pressure. 

That is why the musician has a different relation to the people, machines, 

and the established powers than does the painter. In particular, the estab-

lished powers feel a keen need to control the distribution of black holes and 

lines of deterritorialization in this phylum of sounds, in order to ward off 

or appropriate the effects of musical machinism. Painters, at least as com-

monly portrayed, may be much more open socially, much more political, 

and less controlled from without and within. That is because each time 

they paint, they must create or recreate a phylum, and they must do so on 

the basis of bodies of light and color they themselves produce, whereas 

musicians have at their disposal a kind of germinal continuity, even if it is 

latent or indirect, on the basis of which they produce sound bodies. Two 

different movements of creation: one goes from soma to germen, and the 

other from germen to soma. The painter's refrain is like the flipside of the 

musician's, a negative of music.

 

So just what is a refrain? Glass harmonica: the refrain is a prism, a crys-

tal of space-time. It acts upon that which surrounds it, sound or light, 

extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, projections, or 

transformations. The refrain also has a catalytic function: not only to 

increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds 

it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of 

so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form organized masses. The 

refrain is therefore of the crystal or protein type. The seed, or internal 

structure, then has two essential aspects: augmentations and diminutions, 

additions and withdrawals, amplifications and eliminations by unequal

 

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OF THE REFRAIN □ 349

 

values, but also the presence of a retrograde motion running in both direc-

tions, as "in the side windows of a moving streetcar." The strange ret-

rograde motion of Joke. It is of the nature of the refrain to become 

concentrated by elimination in a very short moment, as though moving 

from the extremes to a center, or, on the contrary, to develop by additions, 

moving from a center to the extremes, and also to travel these routes in 

both directions.

58

 The refrain fabricates time (du temps). The refrain is the 

"implied tense" (temps) discussed by the linguist Gustave Guillaume. The 

ambiguity of the refrain is more evident now: for if the retrograde motion 

merely forms a closed circle, if the augmentations and diminutions are reg-

ular, proceeding, for example, by doubled or halved values, then this false 

spatiotemporal rigor leaves the exterior aggregate all the fuzzier; that 

aggregate now has only descriptive, indicative, or associative relations 

with the seed. It is "a worksite of inauthentic elements for the formation of 

impure crystals," rather than a pure crystal that harnesses cosmic forces. 

The refrain remains a formula evoking a character or landscape, instead of 

itself constituting a rhythmic character or melodic landscape. The refrain 

has two poles. These poles hinge not only on an intrinsic quality but also on 

a state of force on the part of the listener; thus the little phrase from 

Vinteuil's sonata is associated with Swann's love, the character of Odette, 

and the landscape of the Bois de Boulogne for a long time, until it turns 

back on itself, opens onto itself, revealing until then unheard-of potentiali-

ties, entering into other connections, setting love adrift in the direction of 

other assemblages. Here, Time is not an a priori form; rather, the refrain is 

the a priori form of time, which in each case fabricates different times 
[temps: also, "meters," "tempos"—Trans.].

 

It is odd how music does not eliminate the bad or mediocre refrain, or 

the bad usage of the refrain, but on the contrary carries it along, or uses it as 

a springboard. "Ah, vous dirai-je maman" ("Ah, mamma, now you shall 

know"), "Elle avait une jambe de bois" ("She had a wooden leg"), "Frere 

Jacques." Childhood or bird refrain, folk song, drinking song, Viennese 

waltz, cow bells: music uses anything and sweeps everything away. Not that 

a folk song, bird song, or children's song is reducible to the kind of closed 

and associative formula we just mentioned. Instead, what needs to be 

shown is that a musician requires a first type of refrain, a territorial or 

assemblage refrain, in order to transform it from within, deterritorialize it, 

producing a refrain of the second type as the final end of music: the cosmic 

refrain of a sound machine. Gisele Brelet, discussing Bartok, gives a good 

formulation of the problem of the two types: beginning from popular and 

territorial  melodies  that are autonomous, self-sufficient, and closed in 

upon themselves, how can one construct a new chromaticism that places 

them in communication, thereby creating "themes" bringing about a devel-

 

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1837: OF THE REFRAIN

 

opment of Form, or rather a becoming of Forces? The problem is a general 

one because in many directions refrains will be planted by a new seed that 

brings back modes, makes those modes communicate, undoes tempera-

ment, melds major and minor, and cuts the tonal system loose, slipping 

through its net instead of breaking with it.

59

 We may say long live Chabrier, 

as opposed to Schoenberg, just as Nietzsche said long live Bizet, and for the 

same reasons, with the same technical and musical intent. We go from 

modality to an untempered, widened chromaticism. We do not need to 

suppress tonality, we need to turn it loose. We go from assembled refrains 

(territorial, popular, romantic, etc.) to the great cosmic machined refrain. 

But the labor of creation is already under way in the first type; it is there in 

its entirety. Deformations destined to harness a great force are already 

present in the small-form refrain or rondo. Childhood scenes, children's 

games: the starting point is a childlike refrain, but the child has wings 

already, he becomes celestial. The becoming-child of the musician is cou-

pled with a becoming-aerial of the child, in a nondecomposable block. The 

memory of an angel, or rather the becoming of a cosmos. Crystal: the 

becoming-bird of Mozart is inseparable from a becoming-initiate of the 

bird, and forms a block with it.

60

 It is the extremely profound labor dedi-

cated to the first type of refrain that creates the second type, or the little 

phrase of the Cosmos. In a concerto, Schumann requires all the assem-

blages of the orchestra to make the cello wander the way a light fades into 

the distance or is extinguished. In Schumann, a whole learned labor, at 

once rythmic, harmonic, and melodic, has this sober and simple result: 
deterritorialize the refrain.

61

 Produce a deterritorialized refrain as the final 

end of music, release it in the Cosmos—that is more important than build-

ing a new system. Opening the assemblage onto a cosmic force. In the pas-

sage from one to the other, from the assemblage of sounds to the Machine 

that renders it sonorous, from the becoming-child of the musician to the 

becoming-cosmic of the child, many dangers crop up: black holes, closures, 

paralysis of the finger and auditory hallucinations, Schumann's madness, 

cosmic force gone bad, a note that pursues you, a sound that transfixes you. 

Yet one was already present in the other; the cosmic force was already pres-

ent in the material, the great refrain in the little refrains, the great maneu-

ver in the little maneuver. Except we can never be sure we will be strong 

enough, for we have no system, only lines and movements. Schumann.

 

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12. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology— 

The War Machine

 

 

Nomad Chariot, Entirely of Wood, Altai, Fifth to Fourth Centuries B.C.

 

A

XIOM 

I. The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus. 

P

ROPOSITION 

I. This exteriority is first attested to in mythology, epic, 

drama, and games.

 

Georges Dumezil, in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology, 

has shown that political sovereignty, or domination, has two heads: the 

magician-king and the jurist-priest. Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, 

Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the 

binder and the organizer. Undoubtedly, these two poles stand in opposi-

tion term by term, as the obscure and the clear, the violent and the calm, the 

quick and the weighty, the fearsome and the regulated, the "bond" and the 

"pact," etc.' But their opposition is only relative; they function as a pair, in 

alternation, as though they expressed a division of the One or constituted 

in themselves a sovereign unity. "At once antithetical and complementary, 

necessary to one another and consequently without hostility, lacking a

 

351

 

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mythology of conflict: a specification on any one level automatically calls 

forth a homologous specification on another. The two together exhaust the 

field of the function." They are the principal elements of a State apparatus 

that proceeds by a One-Two, distributes binary distinctions, and forms a 

milieu of interiority. It is a double articulation that makes the State appara-

tus into a stratum.

 

It will be noted that war is not contained within this apparatus. Either 

the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled through war— 

either it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and 

no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, "seizes" and 

"binds," preventing all combat—or, the State acquires an army, but in a 

way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of 

a military function.

2

 As for the war machine in itself, it seems to be irreduc-

ible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: 

it comes from elsewhere. Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna 
no less than to Mitra? 
He can no more be reduced to one or the other than 

he can constitute a third of their kind. Rather, he is like a pure and immeas-

urable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power 

of metamorphosis. He unties the bond just as he betrays the pact. He brings 
a furor to bear against sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against 

the public, a power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the 

apparatus. He bears witness to another kind of justice, one of incompre-

hensible cruelty at times, but at others of unequaled pity as well (because he 

unties bonds.. .).

4

 He bears witness, above all, to other relations with 

women, with animals, because he sees all things in relations of becoming, 

rather than implementing binary distributions between "states": a verita-

ble becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies out-

side dualities of terms as well as correspondences between relations. In 

every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature, 

another origin than the State apparatus.

 

Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the 

State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and 

Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the 

pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the 

emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal 

nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, 

and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, 

a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement 

endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a sub-

ject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game's form of 

interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic 

units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function:

 

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TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE □ 353

 

"It" makes a move. "It" could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go 

pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no 

intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very dif-

ferent in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces 

entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary's 

pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has 

only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constella-

tions, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such 

as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an 

entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so 

diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regu-

lated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war 

without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles 

even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at 

all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, 

thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum num-

ber of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question 

of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the 

possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one 

point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, with-

out departure or arrival. The "smooth" space of Go, as against the "stri-

ated" space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos 

against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas 

Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it 

(make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the con-

struction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by 

shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, 

by going elsewhere . ..). Another justice, another movement, another 

space-time.

 

"They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext. . ." "In 

some way that is incomprehensible they have pushed right into the capital. 

At any rate, here they are; it seems that every morning there are more of 

them."

5

 Luc de Heusch analyzes a Bantu myth that leads us to the same 

schema: Nkongolo, an indigenous emperor and administrator of public 

works, a man of the public and a man of the police, gives his half-sisters to 

the hunter Mbidi, who assists him and then leaves. Mbidi's son, a man of 

secrecy, joins up with his father, only to return from the outside with that 

inconceivable thing, an army. He kills Nkongolo and proceeds to build a 

new State.

6

 "Between" the magical-despotic State and the juridical State 

containing a military institution, we see the flash of the war machine, arriv-

ing from without.

 

From the standpoint of the State, the originality of the man of war, his

 

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1227: TREATISE ON NOMADOLOGY—THE WAR MACHINE

 

eccentricity, necessarily appears in a negative form: stupidity, deformity, 

madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin. Dumezil analyzes the three "sins" 

of the warrior in the Indo-European tradition: against the king, against the 

priest, against the laws originating in the State (for example, a sexual trans-

gression that compromises the distribution of men and women, or even a 

betrayal of the laws of war as instituted by the State).

7

 The warrior is in the 

position of betraying everything, including the function of the military, or 

of understanding nothing. It happens that historians, both bourgeois and 

Soviet, will follow this negative tradition and explain how Genghis Khan 

understood nothing: he "didn't understand" the phenomenon of the city. 

An easy thing to say. The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine 

in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains diffi-

cult to conceptualize. It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is 

external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving 

the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority, whereas the State appa-

ratus constitutes the form of interiority we habitually take as a model, or 

according to which we are in the habit of thinking. What complicates 

everything is that this extrinsic power of the war machine tends, under cer-

tain circumstances, to become confused with one of the two heads of the 

State apparatus. Sometimes it is confused with the magic violence of the 

State, at other times with the State's military institution. For instance, the 

war machine invents speed and secrecy; but there is all the same a certain 

speed and a certain secrecy that pertain to the State, relatively, secondarily. 

So there is a great danger of identifying the structural relation between the 

two poles of political sovereignty, and the dynamic interrelation of these 

two poles, with the power of war. Dumezil cites the lineage of the Roman 

kings: there is a Romulus-Numa relation that recurs throughout a series, 

with variants and an alternation between these two types of equally legiti-

mate rulers; but there is also a relation with an "evil king," Tullus Hostilius, 

Tarquinius Superbus, an upsurge of the warrior as a disquieting and illegit-

imate character.

8

 Shakespeare's kings could also be invoked: even violence, 

murders, and perversion do not prevent the State lineage from producing 

"good" kings; but a disturbing character like Richard III slips in, announc-

ing from the outset his intention to reinvent a war machine and impose its 

line (deformed, treacherous and traitorous, he claims a "secret close 

intent"

9

 totally different from the conquest of State power, and another 

—an other—relation with women). In short, whenever the irruption of war 

power is confused with the line of State domination, everything gets mud-

dled; the war machine can then be understood only through the categories 

of the negative, since nothing is left that remains outside the State. But, 

returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war machine is seen to be of 

another species, of another nature, of another origin. One would have to

 

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say that it is located between the two heads of the State, between the two 

articulations, and that it is necessary in order to pass from one to the other. 

But "between" the two, in that instant, even ephemeral, if only a flash, it 

proclaims its own irreducibility. The State has no war machine of its own; it 

can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will 

continually cause it problems. This explains the mistrust States have 

toward their military institutions, in that the military institution inherits 

an extrinsic war machine. Karl von Clausewitz has a general sense of this 

situation when he treats the flow of absolute war as an Idea that States par-

tially appropriate according to their political needs, and in relation to 

which they are more or less good "conductors."

 

Trapped between the two poles of political sovereignty, the man of war 

seems outmoded, condemned, without a future, reduced to his own fury, 

which he turns against himself. The descendants of Hercules, Achilles, 

then Ajax, have enough strength left to proclaim their independence from 

Agamemnon, a man of the old State. But they are powerless when it comes 

to Ulysses, a man of the nascent modern State, the first man of the modern 

State. And it is Ulysses who inherits Achilles' arms, only to convert them to 

other uses, submitting them to the laws of the State—not Ajax, who is con-

demned by the goddess he defied and against whom he sinned.

10

 No one 

has portrayed the situation of the man of war, at once eccentric and con-

demned, better than Kleist. In Penthesilea, Achilles is already separated 

from his power: the war machine has passed over to the Amazons, a State-

less woman-people whose justice, religion, and loves are organized 

uniquely in a war mode. Descendants of the Scythians, the Amazons spring 

forth like lightning, "between" the two States, the Greek and the Trojan. 

They sweep away everything in their path. Achilles is brought before his 

double, Penthesilea. And in his ambiguous struggle, Achilles is unable to 

prevent himself from marrying the war machine, or from loving Penthe-

silea, and thus from betraying Agamemnon and Ulysses at the same time. 

Nevertheless, he already belongs enough to the Greek State that Pen-

thesilea, for her part, cannot enter the passional relation of war with him 

without herself betraying the collective law of her people, the law of the 

pack that prohibits "choosing" the enemy and entering into one-to-one 

relationships or binary distinctions.

 

Throughout his work, Kleist celebrates the war machine, setting it 

against the State apparatus in a struggle that is lost from the start. Doubt-

less Arminius heralds a Germanic war machine that breaks with the imper-

ial order of alliances and armies, and stands forever opposed to the Roman 

State. But the Prince of Homburg lives only in a dream and stands con-

demned for having reached victory in disobedience of the law of the State. 

As for Kohlhaas, his war machine can no longer be anything more than

 

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banditry. Is it the destiny of the war machine, when the State triumphs, to 

be caught in this alternative: either to be nothing more than the disci-

plined, military organ of the State apparatus, or to turn against itself, to 

become a double suicide machine for a solitary man and a solitary woman? 

Goethe and Hegel, State thinkers both, see Kleist as a monster, and Kleist 

has lost from the start. Why is it, then, that the most uncanny modernity 

lies with him? It is because the elements of his work are secrecy, speed, and 

affect.'' And in Kleist the secret is no longer a content held within a form of 

interiority; rather, it becomes a form, identified with the form of 

exteriority that is always external to itself. Similarly, feelings become 

uprooted from the interiority of a "subject," to be projected violently out-

ward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible veloc-

ity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects. 

And these affects are so many instances of the becoming-woman, the 

becoming-animal of the warrior (the bear, she-dogs). Affects transpierce 

the body like arrows, they are weapons of war. The deterritorialization 

velocity of affect. Even dreams (Homburg's, Pentheselea's) are externa-

lized, by a system of relays and plug-ins, extrinsic linkages belonging to the 

war machine. Broken rings. This element of exteriority—which dominates 

everything, which Kleist invents in literature, which he is the first to 

invent—will give time a new rhythm: an endless succession of catatonic 

episodes or fainting spells, and flashes or rushes. Catatonia is: "This affect 

is too strong for me," and a flash is: "The power of this affect sweeps me 

away," so that the Self (Moi) is now nothing more than a character whose 

actions and emotions are desubjectified, perhaps even to the point of 

death. Such is Kleist's personal formula: a succession of flights of madness 

and catatonic freezes in which no subjective interiority remains. There is 

much of the East in Kleist: the Japanese fighter, interminably still, who 

then makes a move too quick to see. The Go player. Many things in modern 

art come from Kleist. Goethe and Hegel are old men next to Kleist. Could it 

be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by 

the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into 

thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal 

vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering State? 

Is the war machine already overtaken, condemned, appropriated as part of 

the same process whereby it takes on new forms, undergoes a metamorpho-

sis, affirms its irreducibility and exteriority, and deploys that milieu of 

pure exteriority that the occidental man of the State, or the occidental 

thinker, continually reduces to something other than itself?

 

P

ROBLEM 

I. Is there a way of warding off the formation of a State apparatus 

(or its equivalents in a group)?

 

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P

ROPOSITION 

II. The exteriority of the war machine is also attested to by 

ethnology (a tribute to the memory of Pierre Clastres).

 

Primitive, segmentary societies have often been defined as societies 

without a State, in other words, societies in which distinct organs of power 
do not appear. But the conclusion has been that these societies did not 
reach the degree of economic development, or the level of political differ-
entiation, that would make the formation of the State apparatus both 
possible and inevitable: the implication is that primitive people "don't 
understand" so complex an apparatus. The prime interest in Pierre 
Clastres's theories is that they break with this evolutionist postulate. Not 
only does he doubt that the State is the product of an ascribable economic 
development, but he asks if it is not a potential concern of primitive socie-
ties to ward off or avert that monster they supposedly do not understand. 
Warding off the formation of a State apparatus, making such a formation 
impossible, would be the objective of a certain number of primitive social 
mechanisms, even if they are not consciously understood as such. To be 
sure, primitive societies have chiefs. But the State is not defined by the exis-
tence of chiefs; it is defined by the perpetuation or conservation of organs 
of power. The concern of the State is to conserve. Special institutions are 
thus necessary to enable a chief to become a man of State, but diffuse, col-
lective mechanisms are just as necessary to prevent a chief from becoming 
one. Mechanisms for warding off, preventive mechanisms, are a part of 
chieftainship and keep an apparatus distinct from the social body from 
crystallizing. Clastres describes the situation of the chief, who has no insti-
tuted weapon other than his prestige, no other means of persuasion, no 
other rule than his sense of the group's desires. The chief is more like a 
leader or a star than a man of power and is always in danger of being disa-
vowed, abandoned by his people. But Clastres goes further, identifying war 
in primitive societies as the surest mechanism directed against the forma-
tion of the State: war maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of groups, 
and the warrior himself is caught in a process of accumulating exploits 
leading him to solitude and a prestigious but powerless death.

12

 Clastres 

can thus invoke natural Law while reversing its principal proposition: just 
as Hobbes saw clearly that the State was against war, so war is against the 
State,  
and makes it impossible. It should not be concluded that war is a 
state of nature, but rather that it is the mode of a social state that wards off 
and prevents the State. Primitive war does not produce the State any more 
than it derives from it. And it is no better explained by exchange than by 
the State: far from deriving from exchange, even as a sanction for its fail-
ure, war is what limits exchanges, maintains them in the framework of

 

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"alliances"; it is what prevents them from becoming a State factor, from 

fusing groups.

 

The importance of this thesis is first of all to draw attention to collective 

mechanisms of inhibition. These mechanisms may be subtle, and function 

as micromechanisms. This is easily seen in certain band or pack phenom-

ena. For example, in the case of gangs of street children in Bogota, Jacques 

Meunier cites three ways in which the leader is prevented from acquiring 

stable power: the members of the band meet and undertake their theft 

activity in common, with collective sharing of the loot, but they disperse to 

eat or sleep separately; also, and especially, each member of the band is 

paired off with one, two, or three other members, so if he has a disagree-

ment with the leader, he will not leave alone but will take along his allies, 

whose combined departure will threaten to break up the entire gang; 

finally, there is a diffuse age limit, and at about age fifteen a member is 

inevitably induced to quit the gang.

13

 These mechanisms cannot be under-

stood without renouncing the evolutionist vision that sees bands or packs 

as a rudimentary, less organized, social form. Even in bands of animals, 

leadership is a complex mechanism that does not act to promote the 

strongest but rather inhibits the installation of stable powers, in favor of a 

fabric of immanent relations.

14

 One could just as easily compare the form 

"high-society life" to the form "sociability" among the most highly evolved 

men and women: high-society groups are similar to gangs and operate by 

the diffusion of prestige rather than by reference to centers of power, as in 

social groupings (Proust clearly showed this noncorrespondence of 

high-society values and social values). Eugene Sue, a man of high society 

and a dandy, whom legitimists reproached for frequenting the Orleans 

family, used to say: "I'm not on the side of the family, I side with the pack." 

Packs, bands, are groups of the rhizome type, as opposed to the 

arborescent type that centers around organs of power. That is why bands 

in general, even those engaged in banditry or high-society life, are 

metamorphoses of a war machine formally distinct from all State 

apparatuses or their equivalents, which are instead what structure 

centralized societies. We certainly would not say that discipline is what 

defines a war machine: discipline is the characteristic required of armies 

after the State has appropriated them. The war machine answers to other 

rules. We are not saying that they are better, of course, only that they 

animate a fundamental indiscipline of the warrior, a questioning of 

hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment or betrayal, and a very 

volatile sense of honor, all of which, once again, impedes the formation 

of the State.

 

But why does this argument fail to convince us entirely? We follow 

Clastres when he demonstrates that the State is explained neither by a 

development of productive forces nor by a differentiation of political

 

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forces. It is the State, on the contrary, that makes possible the undertaking 

of large-scale projects, the constitution of surpluses, and the organization 

of the corresponding public functions. The State is what makes the distinc-

tion between governors and governed possible. We do not see how the State 

can be explained by what it presupposes, even with recourse to dialectics. 

The State seems to rise up in a single stroke, in an imperial form, and does 

not depend on progressive factors. Its on-the-spot emergence is like a 

stroke of genius, the birth of Athena. We also follow Clastres when he shows 

that the war machine is directed against the State, either against potential 

States whose formation it wards off in advance, or against actual States 

whose destruction it purposes. No doubt the war machine is realized more 

completely in the "barbaric" assemblages of nomadic warriors than in the 

"savage" assemblages of primitive societies. In any case, it is out of the 

question that the State could be the result of a war in which the conquerors 

imposed, by the very fact of their victory, a new law on the vanquished, 

because the organization of the war machine is directed against the 

State-form, actual or virtual. The State is no better accounted for as a 

result of war than by a progression of economic or political forces. This 

is where Clastres locates the break: between "primitive" counter-State 

societies and "monstrous" State societies whose formation it is no longer 

possible to explain. Clastres is fascinated by the problem of "voluntary 

servitude," in the manner of La Boetie: In what way did people want or 

desire servitude, which most certainly did not come to them as the 

outcome of an involuntary and unfortunate war? They did, after all, have 

counter-State mechanisms at their disposal: So how and why the State? 

Why did the State triumph? The more deeply Clastres delved into the 

problem, the more he seemed to deprive himself of the means of resolving 

it.'

5

 He tended to make primitive societies hypostases, self-sufficient 

entities (he insisted heavily on this point). He made their formal 

exteriority into a real independence. Thus he remained an evolutionist, 

and posited a state of nature. Only this state of nature was, according to 

him, a fully social reality instead of a pure concept, and the evolution was 

a sudden mutation instead of a development. For on the one hand, the 

State rises up in a single stroke, fully formed; on the other, the 

counter-State societies use very specific mechanisms to ward it off, to 

prevent it from arising. We believe that these two propositions are valid 

but that their interlinkage is flawed. There is an old scenario: "from clans 

to empires," or "from bands to kingdoms." But nothing says that this 

constitutes an evolution, since bands and clans are no less organized than 

empire-kingdoms. We will never leave the evolution hypothesis behind 

by creating a break between the two terms, that is, by endowing bands 

with self-sufficiency and the State with an emergence all the more 

miraculous and monstrous.

 

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We are compelled to say that there has always been a State, quite perfect, 

quite complete. The more discoveries archaeologists make, the more 

empires they uncover. The hypothesis of the Urstaat seems to be verified: 

"The State clearly dates back to the most remote ages of humanity." It is 

hard to imagine primitive societies that would not have been in contact 

with imperial States, at the periphery or in poorly controlled areas. But of 

greater importance is the inverse hypothesis: that the State itself has always 

been in a relation with an outside and is inconceivable independent of that 

relationship. The law of the State is not the law of All or Nothing (State 

societies or counter-State societies) but that of interior and exterior. The 

State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of 

internalizing, of appropriating locally. Not only is there no universal State, 

but the outside of States cannot be reduced to "foreign policy," that is, to a 

set of relations among States. The outside appears simultaneously in two 

directions: huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire 
ecumenon at a given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in 

relation to the States (for example, commercial organization of the "multi-

national" type, or industrial complexes, or even religious formations like 

Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic movements, etc.); but 

also the local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue 

to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of 

State power. The modern world can provide us today with particularly 

well developed images of these two directions: worldwide ecumenical 

machines, but also a neoprimitivism, a new tribal society as described by 

Marshall McLuhan. These directions are equally present in all social 

fields, in all periods. It even happens that they partially merge. For exam-

ple, a commercial organization is also a band of pillage, or piracy, for part 

of its course and in many of its activities; or it is in bands that a religious 

formation begins to operate. What becomes clear is that bands, no less than 

worldwide organizations, imply a form irreducible to the State and that 

this form of exteriority necessarily presents itself as a diffuse and 

polymorphous war machine. It is a nomos very different from the "law." 

The State-form, as a form of interiority, has a tendency to reproduce itself, 

remaining identical to itself across its variations and easily recognizable 

within the limits of its poles, always seeking public recognition (there is no 

masked State). But the war machine's form of exteriority is such that it 

exists only in its own metamorphoses; it exists in an industrial innovation 

as well as in a technological invention, in a commercial circuit as well as in a 

religious creation, in all flows and currents that only secondarily allow 

themselves to be appropriated by the State. It is in terms not of indepen-

dence, but of coexistence and competition in a perpetual field of interac-
tion, 
that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machines of

 

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metamorphosis and State apparatuses of identity, bands and kingdoms, 

megamachines and empires. The same field circumscribes its interiority in 

States, but describes its exteriority in what escapes States or stands against 

States.

 

P

ROPOSITION 

III. The exteriority of the war ma chine is also attested to by 

epistemology, which intimates the existence and perpetuation of a 
"nomad"or "minor science."

 

There is a kind of science, or treatment of science, that seems very dif-

ficult to classify, whose history is even difficult to follow. What we are 

referring to are not "technologies" in the usual sense of the term. But nei-

ther are they "sciences" in the royal or legal sense established by history. 

According to a recent book by Michel Serres, both the atomic physics of 

Democritus and Lucretius and the geometry of Archimedes are marked 

by it.

16

 The characteristics of this kind of eccentric science would seem to 

be the following:

 

1.  First of all, it uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory of 

solids treating fluids as a special case; ancient atomism is inseparable from 

flows, and flux is reality itself, or consistency. 

2.  The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as 

opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant. It is a "para-

dox" to make becoming itself a model, and no longer a secondary charac-

teristic, a copy; in the Timaeus, Plato raises this possibility, but only in 

order to exclude it and conjure it away in the name of royal science. By con-

trast, in atomism, just such a model of heterogeneity, and of passage or 

becoming in the heterogeneous, is furnished by the famed declination of 

the atom. The clinamen, as the minimum angle, has meaning only between 

a straight line and a curve, the curve and its tangent, and constitutes the 

original curvature of the movement of the atom. The clinamen is the small-

est angle by which an atom deviates from a straight path.

17

 It is a passage to 

the limit, an exhaustion, a paradoxical "exhaustive" model. The same 

applies to Archimedean geometry, in which the straight line, defined as 

"the shortest path between two points," is just a way of defining the length 

of a curve in a predifferential calculus. 

3.  One no longer goes from the straight line to its parallels, in a lamellar 

or laminar flow,

18

 but from a curvilinear declination to the formation of 

spirals and vortices on an inclined plane: the greatest slope for the smallest 

angle. From turba to turbo: in other words, from bands or packs of atoms to 

the great vortical organizations.

19

 The model is a vortical one; it operates in 

an open space throughout which things-flows are distributed, rather than 

plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things. It is the difference 

between a smooth (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a striated 

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(metric) space: in the first case "space is occupied without being counted," 

and in the second case "space is counted in order to be occupied."

20

 

4. Finally, the model is problematic, rather than theorematic: figures 

are considered only from the viewpoint of the affections that befall them: 

sections, ablations, adjunctions, projections. One does not go by specific 

differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a stable 

essence to the properties deriving from it, but rather from a problem to 

the accidents that condition and resolve it. This involves all kinds of 

deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which 

each figure designates an "event" much more than an essence; the square 

no longer exists independently of a quadrature, the cube of a cubature, the 

straight line of a rectification. Whereas the theorem belongs to the 

rational order, the problem is affective and is inseparable from the meta-

morphoses, generations, and creations within science itself. Despite what 

Gabriel Marcel may say, the problem is not an "obstacle"; it is the surpass-

ing of the obstacle, a pro-jection, in other words, a war machine. All of this 

movement is what royal science is striving to limit when it reduces as 

much as possible the range of the "problem-element" and subordinates it 

to the "theorem-element."

21

 

This Archimedean science, or this conception of science, is bound up in 

an essential way with the war machine: theproblemata are the war machine 

itself and are inseparable from inclined planes, passages to the limit, vorti-

ces, and projections. It would seem that the war machine is projected into 

an abstract knowledge formally different from the one that doubles the 

State apparatus. It would seem that a whole nomad science develops 

eccentrically, one that is very different from the royal or imperial sciences. 

Furthermore, this nomad science is continually "barred," inhibited, or 

banned by the demands and conditions of State science. Archimedes, van-

quished by the Roman State, becomes a symbol.

22

 The fact is that the two 

kinds of science have different modes of formalization, and State science 

continually imposes its form of sovereignty on the inventions of nomad 

science. State science retains of nomad science only what it can appropri-

ate; it turns the rest into a set of strictly limited formulas without any real 

scientific status, or else simply represses and bans it. It is as if the "savants" 

of nomad science were caught between a rock and a hard place, between the 

war machine that nourishes and inspires them and the State that imposes 

upon them an order of reasons. The figure of the engineer (in particular the 

military engineer), with all its ambivalence, is illustrative of this situation. 

Most significant are perhaps borderline phenomena in which nomad sci-

ence exerts pressure on State science, and, conversely, State science appro-

priates and transforms the elements of nomad science. This is true of the 

art of encampments, "castrametation," which has always mobilized pro-

 

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jections and inclined planes: the State does not appropriate this dimension 

of the war machine without submitting it to civil and metric rules that 

strictly limit, control, localize nomad science, and without keeping it from 

having repercussions throughout the social field (in this respect, Vauban is 

like a repeat of Archimedes, and suffers an analogous defeat). It is true of 

descriptive and projective geometry, which royal science would like to turn 

into a mere practical dependency of analytic, or so-called higher, geometry 

(thus the ambiguous situation of Monge and Poncelet as "savants").

23

 It is 

also true of differential calculus. For a long time, it had only parascientific 

status and was labeled a "Gothic hypothesis"; royal science only accorded 

it the value of a convenient convention or a well-founded fiction. The great 

State mathematicians did their best to improve its status, but precisely on 

the condition that all the dynamic, nomadic notions—such as becoming, 

heterogeneity, infinitesimal, passage to the limit, continuous variation 

—be eliminated and civil, static, and ordinal rules be imposed upon it 

(Carnot's ambiguous position in this respect). Finally, it is true of the 

hydraulic model, for it is certain that the State itself needs a hydraulic sci-

ence (there is no going back on Wittfogel's theses on the importance of 

large-scale waterworks for an empire). But it needs it in a very different 

form, because the State needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits, 

pipes, embankments, which prevent turbulence, which constrain move-

ment to go from one point to another, and space itself to be striated and 

measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid, and flows proceed 

by parallel, laminar layers. The hydraulic model of nomad science and the 

war machine, on the other hand, consists in being distributed by turbu-

lence across a smooth space, in producing a movement that holds space 

and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held by space in 

a local movement from one specified point to another.

24

 Democritus, 

Menaechmus, Archimedes, Vauban, Desargues, Bernoulli, Monge, 

Carnot, Poncelet, Perronet, etc.: in each case a monograph would be neces-

sary to take into account the special situation of these savants whom State 

science used only after restraining or disciplining them, after repressing 

their social or political conceptions.

 

The sea as a smooth space is a specific problem of the war machine. As 

Virilio shows, it is at sea that the problem of the fleet in being is posed, in 

other words, the task of occupying an open space with a vortical movement 

that can rise up at any point. In this respect, the recent studies on rhythm, 

on the origin of that notion, do not seem entirely convincing. For we are 

told that rhythm has nothing to do with the movement of waves but rather 

that it designates "form" in general, and more specifically the form of a 

"measured, cadenced" movement.

25

 However, rhythm is never the same as 

measure. And though the atomist Democritus is one of the authors who

 

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speak of rhythm in the sense of form, it should be borne in mind that he 

does so under very precise conditions of fluctuation and that the forms 

made by atoms are primarily large, nonmetric aggregates, smooth spaces 

such as the air, the sea, or even the earth (magnae res). There is indeed such 

a thing as measured, cadenced rhythm, relating to the coursing of a river 

between its banks or to the form of a striated space; but there is also a 

rhythm without measure, which relates to the upswell of a flow, in other 

words, to the manner in which a fluid occupies a smooth space.

 

This opposition, or rather this tension-limit between the two kinds of 

science—nomad, war machine science and royal, State science—reap-

pears at different moments, on different levels. The work of Anne Querrien 

enables us to identify two of these moments; one is the construction of 

Gothic cathedrals in the twelfth century, the other the construction of 

bridges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

26

 Gothic architecture is 

indeed inseparable from a will to build churches longer and taller than the 

Romanesque churches. Ever farther, ever higher ... But this difference is 

not simply quantitative; it marks a qualitative change: the static relation, 

form-matter, tends to fade into the background in favor of a dynamic rela-

tion, material-forces. It is the cutting of the stone that turns it into material 

capable of holding and coordinating forces of thrust, and of constructing 

ever higher and longer vaults. The vault is no longer a form but the line of 

continuous variation of the stones. It is as if Gothic conquered a smooth 

space, while Romanesque remained partially within a striated space (in 

which the vault depends on the juxtaposition of parallel pillars). But stone 

cutting is inseparable from, on the one hand, a plane of projection at 

ground level, which functions as a plane limit, and, on the other hand, a 

series of successive approximations (squaring), or placings-in-variation of 

voluminous stones. Of course, one appealed to the theorematic science of 

Euclid in order to find a foundation for the enterprise: mathematical fig-

ures and equations were thought to be the intelligible form capable of orga-

nizing surfaces and volumes. But according to the legend, Bernard de 

Clairvaux quickly abandoned the effort as too "difficult," appealing to the 

specificity of an operative, Archimedean geometry, a projective and 

descriptive geometry defined as a minor science, more a mathegraphy than 

a matheology. His journeyman, the monk-mason Garin de Troyes, speaks 

of an operative logic of movement enabling the "initiate" to draw, then hew 

the volumes "in penetration in space," to make it so that "the cutting line 

propels the equation" (le trait pousse le chiffre).

21

 One does not represent, 

one engenders and traverses. This science is characterized less by the 

absence of equations than by the very different role they play: instead of 

being good forms absolutely that organize matter, they are "generated" as 

"forces of thrust" (poussees) by the material, in a qualitative calculus of the

 

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optimum. This whole current of Archimedean geometry was taken to its 

highest expression, but was also brought to a temporary standstill, by the 

remarkable seventeenth-century mathematician Desargues. Like most of 

his kind, Desargues wrote little; he nevertheless exerted a great influence 

through his actions and left outlines, rough drafts, and projects, all cen-

tered on problem-events: "Lamentations," "draft project for the cutting of 

stones," "draft project for grappling with the events of the encounters of a 

cone and a plane,. .. Desargues, however, was condemned by the 
parlement of Paris, opposed by the king's secretary; his practices of per-

spective were banned.

28

 Royal, or State, science only tolerates and appro-

priates stone cutting by means of templates  (the opposite of squaring), 

under conditions that restore the primacy of the fixed model of form, 

mathematical figures, and measurement. Royal science only tolerates and 

appropriates perspective if it is static, subjected to a central black hole 

divesting it of its heuristic and ambulatory capacities. But the adventure, 

or event, of Desargues is the same one that had already occurred among the 

Gothic "journeymen" on a collective level. For not only did the Church, in 

its imperial form, feel the need to strictly control the movement of this 

nomad science (it entrusted the Templars with the responsibility of deter-

mining its locations and objects, governing the work sites, and regulating 

construction), but the secular State, in its royal form, turned against the 

Templars themselves, banning the guilds for a number of reasons, at least 

one of which was the prohibition of this operative or minor geometry.

 

Is Anne Querrien right to find yet another echo of the same story in the 

case of bridges in the eighteenth century? Doubtless, the conditions were 

very different, for the division of labor according to State norms was by 

then an accomplished fact. But the fact remains that in the government 

agency in charge of bridges and roadways, roadways were under a 

well-centralized administration while bridges were still the object of 

active, dynamic, and collective experimentation. Trudaine organized 

unusual, open "general assemblies" in his home. Perronet took as his 

inspiration a supple model originating in the Orient: The bridge should 

not choke or obstruct the river. To the heaviness of the bridge, to the 

striated space of thick and regular piles, he opposed a thinning and 

discontinuity of the piles, surbase, and vault, a lightness and continuous 

variation of the whole. But his attempt soon ran up against principled 

opposition; the State, in naming Perronet director of the school, followed 

a frequently used procedure that inhibited experimentation more than 

crowning its achievements. The whole history of the Ecole des Ponts et 

Chaussees (School of Bridges and Roadways) illustrates how this old, 

plebeian "corps" was subordinated to the Ecole des Mines, the Ecole des 

Travaux Publics, and the Ecole Polytechnique, at the same time as its 

activities were increasingly

 

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normalized.

29

 We thus come to the question, What is a collective bodyl 

Undoubtedly, the great collective bodies of a State are differentiated and 

hierarchical organisms that on the one hand enjoy a monopoly over a 

power or function and on the other hand send out local representatives. 

They have a special relation to families, because they link the family model 

to the State model at both ends and regard themselves as "great families" of 

functionaries, clerks, intendants, or farmers. Yet it seems that in many of 

these collective bodies there is something else at work that does not fit into 

this schema. It is not just their obstinate defense of their privileges. It is also 

their aptitude—even caricatural or seriously deformed—to constitute 

themselves as a war machine, following other models, another dynamism, 

a nomadic ambition, over against the State. As an example, there is the 

very old problem of the lobby, a group with fluid contours, whose position 

is very ambiguous in relation to the State it wishes to "influence" and the 

war machine it wishes to promote, to whatever ends.

30

 

body {corps) is not reducible to an organism, any more than esprit de 

corps is reducible to the soul of an organism. Spirit is not better, but it is 

volatile, whereas the soul is weighted, a center of gravity. Must we invoke a 

military origin of the collective body and esprit de corps? "Military" is not 

the part that counts, but rather the distant nomadic origin. Ibn Khaldun 

defines the nomad war machine by: families or lineages 

PLUS 

esprit de 

corps. The war machine entertains a relation to families that is very differ-

ent from its relation to the State. In the war machine, the family is a band 

vector instead of a fundamental cell; a genealogy is transferred from one 

family to another according to the aptitude of a given family at a given time 

to realize the maximum of "agnatic solidarity." Here, it is not the public 

eminence of a family that determines its place in a State organism but the 

reverse; it is the secret power (puissance), or strength of solidarity, and the 

corresponding genealogical mobility that determine its eminence in a war 

body.

31

 This has to do neither with the monopoly of an organic power 

(pouvoir) nor with local representation, but is related to the potential (puis-
sance) 
of a vortical body in a nomad space. Of course, the great bodies of a 

modern State can hardly be thought of as Arab tribes. What we wish to say, 

rather, is that collective bodies always have fringes or minorities that recon-

stitute equivalents of the war machine—in sometimes quite unforeseen 

forms—in specific assemblages such as building bridges or cathedrals or 

rendering judgments or making music or instituting a science, a technology 

... A collective body of captains asserts its demands through the organiza-

tion of the officers and the organism of the superior officers. There are 

always periods when the State as organism has problems with its own col-

lective bodies, when these bodies, claiming certain privileges, are forced in 

spite of themselves to open onto something that exceeds them, a short revo-

 

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lutionary instant, an experimental surge. A confused situation: each time it 

occurs, it is necessary to analyze tendencies and poles, the nature of the 

movements. All of a sudden, it is as if the collective body of the notary pub-

lics were advancing like Arabs or Indians, then regrouping and reorganiz-

ing: a comic opera where you never know what is going to happen next 

(even the cry "The police are with us!" is sometimes heard).

 

Husserl speaks of a protogeometry that addresses vague, in other words, 

vagabond or nomadic, morphological essences. These essences are distinct 

from sensible things, as well as from ideal, royal, or imperial essences. 

Protogeometry, the science dealing with them, is itself vague, in the etymo-

logical sense of "vagabond": it is neither inexact like sensible things nor 

exact like ideal essences, but anexactyet rigorous ("essentially and not acci-

dentally inexact"). The circle is an organic, ideal, fixed essence, but round-

ness is a vague and fluent essence, distinct both from the circle and things 

that are round (a vase, a wheel, the sun). A theorematic figure is a fixed 

essence, but its transformations, distortions, ablations, and augmentations, 

all of its variations, form problematic figures that are vague yet rigorous, 

"lens-shaped," "umbelliform," or "indented." It could be said that vague 

essences extract from things a determination that is more than thinghood 
(choseite),  which is that of corporeality (corporeite), and which perhaps 

even implies an esprit de corps.

32

 But why does Husserl see this as a 

protogeometry, a kind of halfway point and not a pure science? Why does 

he make pure essences dependent upon a passage to the limit, when any 

passage to the limit belongs as such to the vague? What we have, rather, are 

two formally different conceptions of science, and, ontologically, a single 

field of interaction in which royal science continually appropriates the 

contents of vague or nomad science while nomad science continually cuts 

the contents of royal science loose. At the limit, all that counts is the con-

stantly shifting borderline. In Husserl (and also in Kant, though in the 

opposite direction: roundness as the "schema" of the circle), we find a very 

accurate appreciation of the irreducibility of nomad science, but simulta-

neously the concern of a man of the State, or one who sides with the State, 

to maintain a legislative and constituent primacy for royal science. When-

ever this primacy is taken for granted, nomad science is portrayed as a 

prescientific or parascientific or subscientific agency. And most impor-

tant, it becomes impossible to understand the relations between science 

and technology, science and practice, because nomad science is not a sim-

ple technology or practice, but a scientific field in which the problem of 

these relations is brought out and resolved in an entirely different way than 

from the point of view of royal science. The State is perpetually producing 

and reproducing ideal circles, but a war machine is necessary to make 

something round. Thus the specific characteristics of nomad science are

 

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what need to be determined in order to understand both the repression it 

encounters and the interaction "containing" it.

 

Nomad science does not have the same relation to work as royal science. 

Not that the division of labor in nomad science is any less thorough; it is 

different. We know of the problems States have always had with journey-

men's associations, or compagnonnages, the nomadic or itinerant bodies 

of the type formed by masons, carpenters, smiths, etc. Settling, 

seden-tarizing labor power, regulating the movement of the flow of labor, 

assigning it channels and conduits, forming corporations in the sense of 

organisms, and, for the rest, relying on forced manpower recruited on the 

spot (corvee) or among indigents (charity workshops)—this has always 

been one of the principal affairs of the State, which undertook to conquer 

both a band vagabondage and a body nomadism. Let us return to the exam-

ple of Gothic architecture for a reminder of how extensively the journey-

men traveled, building cathedrals near and far, scattering construction 

sites across the land, drawing on an active and passive power (mobility and 

the strike) that was far from convenient for the State. The State's response 

was to take over management of the construction sites, merging all the divi-

sions of labor in the supreme distinction between the intellectual and the 

manual, the theoretical and the practical, modeled upon the difference 

between "governors" and "governed." In the nomad sciences, as in the 

royal sciences, we find the existence of a "plane," but not at all in the same 

way. The ground-level plane of the Gothic journeyman is opposed to the 

metric plane of the architect, which is on paper and off site. The plane of 

consistency or composition is opposed to another plane, that of organiza-

tion or formation. Stone cutting by squaring is opposed to stone cutting 

using templates, which implies the erection of a model for reproduction. It 

can be said not only that there is no longer a need for skilled or qualified 

labor, but also that there is a need for unskilled or unqualified labor, for a 

dequalification of labor. The State does not give power (pouvoir) to the 

intellectuals or conceptual innovators; on the contrary, it makes them a 

strictly dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined yet is suf-

ficient to divest those whose job it becomes simply to reproduce or imple-

ment of all of their power (puissance). This does not shield the State from 

more trouble, this time with the body of intellectuals it itself engendered, 

but which asserts new nomadic and political claims. In any case, if the State 

always finds it necessary to repress the nomad and minor sciences, if it 

opposes vague essences and the operative geometry of the trait, it does so 

not because the content of these sciences is inexact or imperfect, or because 

of their magic or initiatory character, but because they imply a division of 

labor opposed to the norms of the State. The difference is not extrinsic: the 

way in which a science, or a conception of science, participates in the

 

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organization of the social field, and in particular induces a division of 

labor, is part of that science itself. Royal science is inseparable from a 

"hylomorphic" model implying both a form that organizes matter and a 

matter prepared for the form; it has often been shown that this schema 

derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into gover-

nors and governed, and later, intellectuals and manual laborers. What 

characterizes it is that all matter is assigned to content, while all form 

passes into expression. It seems that nomad science is more immediately in 

tune with the connection between content and expression in themselves, 

each of these two terms encompassing both form and matter. Thus matter, 

in nomad science, is never prepared and therefore homogenized matter, 

but is essentially laden with singularities (which constitute a form of con-

tent). And neither is expression formal; it is inseparable from pertinent 

traits (which constitute a matter of expression). This is an entirely different 

schema, as we shall see. We can get a preliminary idea of this situation by 

recalling the most general characteristic of nomad art, in which a dynamic 

connection between support and ornament replaces the matter-form dia-

lectic. From the point of view of nomad science, which presents itself as an 

art as much as a technique, the division of labor fully exists, but it does not 

employ the form-matter duality (even in the case of biunivocal corre-

spondences). Rather, it follows  the connections between singularities of 

matter and traits of expression, and lodges on the level of these connec-

tions, whether they be natural or forced.

33

 This is another organization of 

work and of the social field through work.

 

It is instructive to contrast two models of science, after the manner of 

Plato in the Timaeus.

34

  One could be called Compars  and the other 

Dispars. The compars is the legal or legalist model employed by royal sci-

ence. The search for laws consists in extracting constants, even if those con-

stants are only relations between variables (equations). An invariable form 

for variables, a variable matter of the invariant: such is the foundation of 

the hylomorphic schema. But for the dispars as an element of nomad sci-

ence the relevant distinction is material-forces rather than matter-form. 

Here, it is not exactly a question of extracting constants from variables but 

of placing the variables themselves in a state of continuous variation. If 

there are still equations, they are adequations, inequations, differential 

equations irreducible to the algebraic form and inseparable from a sensible 

intuition of variation. They seize or determine singularities in the matter, 

instead of constituting a general form. They effect individuations through 

events or haecceities, not through the "object" as a compound of matter 

and form; vague essences are nothing other than haecceities. In all these 

respects, there is an opposition between the logos and the nomos, the law 

and the nomos, prompting the comment that the law still "savors of

 

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morality."

35

 This does not mean, however, that the legal model knows noth-

ing of forces, the play of forces. That it does is evident in the homogeneous 

space corresponding to the compars. Homogeneous space is in no way a 

smooth space; on the contrary, it is the form of striated space. The space of 
pillars. It is striated by the fall of bodies, the verticals of gravity, the distri-

bution of matter into parallel layers, the lamellar and laminar movement 

of flows. These parallel verticals have formed an independent dimension 

capable of spreading everywhere, of formalizing all the other dimensions, 

of striating all of space in all of its directions, so as to render it homoge-

neous. The vertical distance between two points provided the mode of 

comparison for the horizontal distance between two other points. Univer-

sal attraction became the law of all laws, in that it set the rule for the 

biunivocal correspondence between two bodies; and each time science dis-

covered a new field, it sought to formalize it in the same mode as the field of 

gravity. Even chemistry became a royal science only by virtue of a whole 

theoretical elaboration of the notion of weight. Euclidean space is founded 

on the famous parallel postulate, but the parallels in question are in the 

first place gravitational parallels, and correspond to the forces exerted by 

gravity on all the elements of a body presumed to fill that space. It is the 

point of application of the resultant of all of these parallel forces that 

remains invariable when their common direction is changed or the body is 

rotated (the center of gravity). In short, it seems that the force of gravity lies 

at the basis of a laminar, striated, homogeneous, and centered space; it 

forms the foundation for those multiplicities termed metric, or 

arborescent, whose dimensions are independent of the situation and are 

expressed with the aid of units and points (movements from one point to 

another). It was not some metaphysical concern, but an effectively scien-

tific one, that frequently led scientists in the nineteenth century to ask if all 

forces were not reducible to gravity, or rather to the form of attraction that 

gives gravity a universal value (a constant relation for all variables) and 

biunivocal scope (two bodies at a time, and no more). It is the form of 

interiority of all science.

 

The nomos, or the dispars, is altogether different. But this is not to say 

that the other forces refute gravity or contradict attraction. Although it is 

true that they do not go against them, they do not result from them either; 

they do not depend on them but testify to events that are always supple-

mentary or of "variable affects." Each time a new field  opened up in 

science—under conditions making this a far more important notion than 

that of form or object—it proved irreducible to the field of attraction and 

the model of the gravitational forces, although not contradictory to them. 

It affirmed a "more" or an excess, and lodged itself in that excess, that devi-

ation. When chemistry took a decisive step forward, it was always by add-

 

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ing to the force of weight bonds of another type (for example, electric) that 

transformed the nature of chemical equations.

36

 But it will be noted that 

the simplest considerations of velocity immediately introduce the differ-

ence between vertical descent and curvilinear motion, or more generally 

between the straight line and the curve, in the differential form of the 

clinamen, or the smallest deviation, the minimum excess. Smooth space is 

precisely the space of the smallest deviation: therefore it has no homogene-

ity, except between infinitely proximate points, and the linking of proximi-

ties is effected independently of any determined path. It is a space of 

contact, of small tactile or manual actions of contact, rather than a visual 

space like Euclid's striated space. Smooth space is a field without conduits 

or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very 

particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multipli-

cities that occupy space without "counting" it and can "be explored only by 

legwork." They do not meet the visual condition of being observable from a 

point in space external to them; an example of this is the system of sounds, 

or even of colors, as opposed to Euclidean space.

 

When we oppose speed and slowness, the quick and the weighty, 

Celeritas and Gravitas, this must not be seen as a quantitative opposition, 

or as a mythological structure (although Dumezil has established the myth-

ological importance of this opposition, precisely in relation to the State 

apparatus and its natural "gravity"). The opposition is both qualitative 

and scientific, in that speed is not merely an abstract characteristic of 

movement in general but is incarnated in a moving body that deviates, 

however slightly, from its line of descent or gravity. Slow and rapid are not 
quantitative degrees of movement but rather two types of qualified move-
ment,  
whatever the speed of the former or the tardiness of the latter. 

Strictly speaking, it cannot be said that a body that is dropped has a speed, 

however fast it falls; rather it has an infinitely decreasing slowness in accor-

dance with the law of falling bodies. Laminar movement that striates 

space, that goes from one point to another, is weighty; but rapidity, celerity, 

applies only to movement that deviates to the minimum extent and there-

after assumes a vortical motion, occupying a smooth space, actually draw-

ing smooth space itself. In this space, matter-flow can no longer be cut into 

parallel layers, and movement no longer allows itself to be hemmed into 

biunivocal relations between points. In this sense, the role of the qualita-

tive opposition gravity-celerity, heavy-light, slow-rapid is not that of a 

quantifiable scientific determination but of a condition that is coextensive 

to science and that regulates both the separation and the mixing of the two 

models, their possible interpenetration, the domination of one by the 

other, their alternative. And the best formulation, that of Michel Serres, is 

indeed couched in terms of an alternative, whatever mixes or composi-

 

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tions there may be: "Physics is reducible to two sciences, a general theory of 

routes and paths, and a global theory of waves."

37

 

A distinction must be made between two types of science, or scientific 

procedures: one consists in "reproducing," the other in "following." The 

first involves reproduction, iteration and reiteration; the other, involving 

itineration, is the sum of the itinerant, ambulant sciences. Itineration is too 

readily reduced to a modality of technology, or of the application and veri-

fication of science. But this is not the case: following is not at all the same 
thing as reproducing, 
and one never follows in order to reproduce. The 

ideal of reproduction, deduction, or induction is part of royal science, at all 

times and in all places, and treats differences of time and place as so many 

variables, the constant form of which is extracted precisely by the law: for 

the same phenomena to recur in a gravitational and striated space it is suf-

ficient for the same conditions to obtain, or for the same constant relation 

to hold between the differing conditions and the variable phenomena. 

Reproducing implies the permanence of a fixed point of view that is exter-

nal to what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank. But following 

is something different from the ideal of reproduction. Not better, just dif-

ferent. One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the "singularities" 

of a matter, or rather of a material, and not out to discover a form; when 

one escapes the force of gravity to enter a field of celerity; when one ceases 

to contemplate the course of a laminar flow in a determinate direction, to 

be carried away by a vortical flow; when one engages in a continuous varia-

tion of variables, instead of extracting constants from them, etc. And the 

meaning of Earth completely changes: with the legal model, one is con-

stantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to 

a set of constant relations; but with the ambulant model, the process of 

deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself. "Go first to 

your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By 

now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made 

by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then 

find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the 

devil's weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later. . . you can 

extend the size of your territory."

38

 There are itinerant, ambulant sciences 

that consist in following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities 
are scattered like so many "accidents" 
(problems). For example, why is 

primitive metallurgy necessarily an ambulant science that confers upon 

smiths a quasi-nomadic status? It could be objected that in these examples 

it is still a question of going from one point to another (even if they are sin-

gular points) through the intermediary of channels, and that it is still possi-

ble to cut the flow into layers. But this is only true to the extent that 

ambulant procedures and processes are necessarily tied to a striated

 

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space—always formalized by royal science—which deprives them of their 

model, submits them to its own model, and allows them to exist only in the 

capacity of "technologies" or "applied science." As a general rule, a smooth 

space, a vectorial field, a nonmetric multiplicity are always translatable, 

and necessarily translated, into a "compars": a fundamental operation by 

which one repeatedly overlays upon each point of smooth space a tangent 

Euclidean space endowed with a sufficient number of dimensions, by 

which one reintroduces parallelism between two vectors, treating multipli-

city as though it were immersed in this homogeneous and striated space of 

reproduction, instead of continuing to follow it in an "exploration by 

leg-work."

39

 This is the triumph of the logos or the law over the nomos. But 

the complexity of the operation testifies to the existence of resistances it 

must overcome. Whenever ambulant procedure and process are returned 

to their own model, the points regain their position as singularities that 

exclude all biunivocal relations, the flow regains its curvilinear and 

vortical motion that excludes any parallelism between vectors, and smooth 

space reconquers the properties of contact that prevent it from remaining 

homogeneous and striated. There is always a current preventing the ambu-

lant or itinerant sciences from being completely internalized in the repro-

ductive royal sciences. There is a type of ambulant scientist whom State 

scientists are forever fighting or integrating or allying with, even going so 

far as to propose a minor position for them within the legal system of sci-

ence and technology.

 

It is not that the ambulant sciences are more saturated with irrational 

procedures, with mystery and magic. They only get that way when they fall 

into abeyance. And the royal sciences, for their part, also surround them-

selves with much priestliness and magic. Rather, what becomes apparent 

in the rivalry between the two models is that the ambulant or nomad sci-

ences do not destine science to take on an autonomous power, or even to 

have an autonomous development. They do not have the means for that 

because they subordinate all their operations to the sensible conditions of 

intuition and construction—following  the flow of matter, drawing and 
linking up 
smooth space. Everything is situated in an objective zone of 

fluctuation that is coextensive with reality itself. However refined or rigor-

ous, "approximate knowledge" is still dependent upon sensitive and sensi-

ble evaluations that pose more problems than they solve: problematics is 

still its only mode. In contrast, what is proper to royal science, to its 

theorematic or axiomatic power, is to isolate all operations from the condi-

tions of intuition, making them true intrinsic concepts, or "categories." 

That is precisely why deterritorialization, in this kind of science, implies a 

reterritorialization in the conceptual apparatus. Without this categorical, 

apodictic apparatus, the differential operations would be constrained to

 

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follow the evolution of a phenomenon; what is more, since the experimen-

tation would be open-air, and the construction at ground level, the coordi-

nates permitting them to be erected as stable models would never become 

available. Certain of these requirements are translated in terms of "safety": 

the two cathedrals at Orleans and Beauvais collapsed at the end of the 

twelfth century, and control calculations are difficult to effect for the con-

structions of ambulant science. Although safety is a fundamental element 

in the theoretical norms of the State, and of the political ideal, there is also 

something else at issue as well. Due to all their procedures, the ambulant 

sciences quickly overstep the possibility of calculation: they inhabit that 

"more" that exceeds the space of reproduction and soon run into problems 

that are insurmountable from that point of view; they eventually resolve 

those problems by means of a real-life operation. The solutions are sup-

posed to come from a set of activities that constitute them as 

nonautono-mous. Only royal science, in contrast, has at its disposal a metric 

power that can define a conceptual apparatus or an autonomy of science 

(including the autonomy of experimental science). That is why it is 

necessary to couple ambulant spaces with a space of homogeneity, without 

which the laws of physics would depend on particular points in space. But 

this is less a translation than a constitution: precisely that constitution the 

ambulant sciences did not undertake, and do not have the means to 

undertake. In the field of interaction of the two sciences, the ambulant 

sciences confine themselves to inventing problems whose solution is tied 

to a whole set of collective, nonscientific activities but whose scientific 
solution  
depends, on the contrary, on royal science and the way it has 

transformed the problem by introducing it into its theorematic apparatus 

and its organization of work. This is somewhat like intuition and 

intelligence in Bergson, where only intelligence has the scientific means 

to solve formally the problems posed by intuition, problems that intuition 

would be content to entrust to the qualitative activities of a humanity 

engaged in following matter.

40

 

P

ROBLEM 

II. Is there a way to extricate thought from the State model? 

P

ROPOSITION 

IV. The exteriority of the war machine is attested to, 

finally, by noology.

 

Thought contents are sometimes criticized for being too conformist. 

But the primary question is that of form itself. Thought as such is already in 

conformity with a model that it borrows from the State apparatus, and 

which defines for it goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs, an entire 
organon. There is thus an image of thought covering all of thought; it is the 

special object of "noology" and is like the State-form developed in thought. 

This image has two heads, corresponding to the two poles of sovereignty: 

the imperium of true thinking operating by magical capture, seizure or

 

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binding, constituting the efficacy of a foundation {mythos); a republic of 

free spirits proceeding by pact or contract, constituting a legislative and 

juridical organization, carrying the sanction of a ground (logos). These two 

heads are in constant interference in the classical image of thought: a 

"republic of free spirits whose prince would be the idea of the Supreme 

Being." And if these two heads are in interference, it is not only because 

there are many intermediaries and transitions between them, and because 

the first prepares the way for the second and the second uses and retains the 

first, but also because, antithetical and complementary, they are necessary 

to one another. It is not out of the question, however, that in order to pass 

from one to the other there must occur, "between" them, an event of an 

entirely different nature, one that hides outside the image, takes place out-

side.

41

 But confining ourselves to the image, it appears that it is not simply a 

metaphor when we are told of an imperium of truth and a republic of spirits. 

It is the necessary condition for the constitution of thought as principle, or 

as a form of interiority, as a stratum.

 

It is easy to see what thought gains from this: a gravity it would never 

have on its own, a center that makes everything, including the State, appear 

to exist by its own efficacy or on its own sanction. But the State gains just as 

much. Indeed, by developing in thought in this way the State-form gains 

something essential: a whole consensus. Only thought is capable of invent-

ing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevating the State to 

the level of de jure universality. It is as if the sovereign were left alone in the 

world, spanned the entire ecumenon, and now dealt only with actual or 

potential subjects. It is no longer a question of powerful, extrinsic organiza-

tions, or of strange bands: the State becomes the sole principle separating 

rebel subjects, who are consigned to the state of nature, from consenting 

subjects, who rally to its form of their own accord. If it is advantageous for 

thought to prop itself up with the State, it is no less advantageous for the 

State to extend itself in thought, and to be sanctioned by it as the unique, 

universal form. The particularity of States becomes merely an accident of 

fact, as is their possible perversity, or their imperfection. For the modern 

State defines itself in principle as "the rational and reasonable organiza-

tion of a community": the only remaining particularity a community has is 

interior or moral (the spirit of a people), at the same time as the community 

is funneled by its organization toward the harmony of a universal (absolute 
spirit). 
The State gives thought a form of interiority, and thought gives that 

interiority a form of universality: "The goal of worldwide organization is 

the satisfaction of reasonable individuals within particular free States." 

The exchange that takes place between the State and reason is a curious 

one; but that exchange is also an analytic proposition, because realized rea-

son is identified with the de jure State, just as the State is the becoming of

 

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reason.

42

 In so-called modern philosophy, and in the so-called modern or 

rational State, everything revolves around the legislator and the subject. 

The State must realize the distinction between the legislator and the sub-

ject under formal conditions permitting thought, for its part, to conceptu-

alize their identity. Always obey. The more you obey, the more you will be 

master, for you will only be obeying pure reason, in other words yourself... 

Ever since philosophy assigned itself the role of ground it has been giving 

the established powers its blessing, and tracing its doctrine of faculties onto 

the organs of State power. Common sense, the unity of all the faculties at 

the center constituted by the Cogito, is the State consensus raised to the 

absolute. This was most notably the great operation of the Kantian "cri-

tique," renewed and developed by Hegelianism. Kant was constantly criti-

cizing bad usages, the better to consecrate the function. It is not at all 

surprising that the philosopher has become a public professor or State 

functionary. It was all over the moment the State-form inspired an image of 

thought. With full reciprocity. Doubtless, the image itself assumes differ-

ent contours in accordance with the variations on this form: it has not 

always delineated or designated the philosopher, and will not always delin-

eate him. It is possible to pass from a magical function to a rational func-

tion. The poet in the archaic imperial State was able to play the role of 

image trainer.

43

 In modern States, the sociologist succeeded in replacing 

the philosopher (as, for example, when Durkheim and his disciples set out 

to give the republic a secular model of thought). Even today, psychoanaly-

sis lays claim to the role of Cogitatio universalis as the thought of the Law, 

in a magical return. And there are quite a few other competitors and pre-

tenders. Noology, which is distinct from ideology, is precisely the study of 

images of thought, and their historicity. In a sense, it could be said that all 

this has no importance, that thought has never had anything but laughable 

gravity. But that is all it requires: for us not to take it seriously. Because that 

makes it all the easier for it to think for us, and to be forever engendering 

new functionaries. Because the less people take thought seriously, the more 

they think in conformity with what the State wants. Truly, what man of the 

State has not dreamed of that paltry impossible thing—to be a thinker?

 

But noology is confronted by counterthoughts, which are violent in their 

acts and discontinuous in their appearances, and whose existence is mobile 

in history. These are the acts of a "private thinker," as opposed to the public 

professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov. Wherever they dwell, 

it is the steppe or the desert. They destroy images. Nietzsche's Schopen-
hauer as Educator 
is perhaps the greatest critique ever directed against the 

image of thought and its relation to the State. "Private thinker," however, is 

not a satisfactory expression, because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a 

question of outside thought.

44

 To place thought in an immediate relation

 

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with the outside, with the forces of the outside, in short to make thought a 

war machine, is a strange undertaking whose precise procedures can be 

studied in Nietzsche (the aphorism, for example, is very different from the 

maxim, for a maxim, in the republic of letters, is like an organic State act or 

sovereign judgment, whereas an aphorism always awaits its meaning from 

a new external force, a final force that must conquer or subjugate it, utilize 

it). There is another reason why "private thinker" is not a good expression. 

Although it is true that this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude, 

it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already 

intertwined with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, 

existing only through it, though it is not yet here. "We are lacking that final 

force, in the absence of a people to bear us. We are looking for that popular 

support." Every thought is already a tribe, the opposite of a State. And this 

form of exteriority of thought is not at all symmetrical to the form of 

interiority. Strictly speaking, symmetry exists only between different poles 

or focal points of interiority. But the form of exteriority of thought—the 

force that is always external to itself, or the final force, the «th power—is 

not at all another image in opposition to the image inspired by the State 

apparatus. It is, rather, a force that destroys both the image and its copies, 

the model and  its reproductions, every possibility of subordinating 

thought to a model of the True, the Just, or the Right (Cartesian truth, 

Kantian just, Hegelian right, etc.). A "method" is the striated space of the 
cogitatio universalis and draws a path that must be followed from one point 

to another. But the form of exteriority situates thought in a smooth space 

that it must occupy without counting, and for which there is no possible 

method, no conceivable reproduction, but only relays, intermezzos, resur-

gences. Thought is like the Vampire; it has no image, either to constitute a 

model of or to copy. In the smooth space of Zen, the arrow does not go from 

one point to another but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other 

point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target. The problem of 

the war machine is that of relaying, even with modest means, not that of the 

architectonic model or the monument. An ambulant people of relayers, 

rather than a model society. "Nature propels the philosopher into mankind 

like an arrow; it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere. But 

countless times it misses and is depressed at the fact.... The artist and the 

philosopher are evidence against the purposiveness of nature as regards the 

means it employs, though they are also first-rate evidence as to the wisdom 

of its purpose. They strike home at only a few, while they ought to strike 

home at everybody—and even these few are not struck with the force with 

which the philosopher and artist launch their shot."

45

 

We have in mind in particular two pathetic texts, in the sense that in them 

thought is truly a pathos (an antilogos and an antimythos). One is a

 

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text by Artaud, in his letters to Jacques Riviere, explaining that thought 

operates on the basis of a central breakdown, that it lives solely by its own 

incapacity to take on form, bringing into relief only traits of expression in a 

material, developing peripherally, in a pure milieu of exteriority, as a func-

tion of singularities impossible to universalize, of circumstances impossi-

ble to interiorize. The other is the text by Kleist, "On the Gradual 

Formation of Ideas in Speech" ("Uber die allmachliche Verfertigung der 

Gedanken beim Reden"), in which Kleist denounces the central interiority 

of the concept as a means of control—the control of speech, of language, 

but also of affects, circumstances and even chance. He distinguishes this 

from thought as a proceeding and a process, a bizarre anti-Platonic dia-

logue, an antidialogue between brother and sister where one speaks before 

knowing while the other relays before having understood: this, Kleist says, 

is the thought of the Gemut, which proceeds like a general in a war machine 

should, or like a body charged with electricity, with pure intensity. "I mix 

inarticulate sounds, lengthen transitional terms, as well as using apposi-

tions when they are unnecessary." Gain some time, and then perhaps 

renounce, or wait. The necessity of not having control over language, of 

being a foreigner in one's own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself 

and "bring something incomprehensible into the world." Such is the form 

of exteriority, the relation between brother and sister, the 

becoming-woman of the thinker, the becoming-thought of the woman: the 
Gemut that refuses to be controlled, that forms a war machine. A thought 

grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior 

form, operating by relays instead of forming an image; an event-thought, a 

haecceity, instead of a subject-thought, a problem-thought instead of an 

essence-thought or theorem; a thought that appeals to a people instead of 

taking itself for a government ministry. Is it by chance that whenever a 

"thinker" shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State, a shadow or an image 

of a man of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to 

assign him a target or "aim"? Jacques Riviere does not hesitate to respond 

to Artaud: work at it, keep on working, things will come out all right, you 

will succeed in finding a method and in learning to express clearly what 

you think in essence (cogitatio universalis). Riviere is not a head of State, 

but he would not be the last in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise to mistake 

himself for the secret prince in a republic of letters or the gray eminence in a 

State of right. Lenz and Kleist confronted Goethe, that grandiose genius, of 

all men of letters a veritable man of the State. But that is not the worst of it: 

the worst is the way the texts of Kleist and Artaud themselves have ended 

up becoming monuments, inspiring a model to be copied—a model far 

more insidious than the others—for the artificial stammerings and 

innumerable tracings that claim to be their equal.

 

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The classical image of thought, and the striating of mental space it 

effects, aspires to universality. It in effect operates with two "universals," 

the Whole as the final ground of being or all-encompassing horizon, and 

the Subject as the principle that converts being into being-for-us.

46

 

Im-perium and republic. Between the two, all of the varieties of the real and 

the true find their place in a striated mental space, from the double point 

of view of Being and the Subject, under the direction of a "universal 

method." It is now easy for us to characterize the nomad thought that 

rejects this image and does things differently. It does not ally itself with a 

universal thinking subject but, on the contrary, with a singular race; and it 

does not ground itself in an all-encompassing totality but is on the 

contrary deployed in a horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe, 

desert, or sea. An entirely different type of adequation is established here, 

between the race defined as "tribe" and smooth space defined as "milieu." 

A tribe in the desert instead of a universal subject within the horizon of 

all-encompassing Being. Kenneth White recently stressed this 

dissymmetrical complementarity between a race-tribe (the Celts, those 

who feel they are Celts) and a milieu-space (the Orient, the Gobi 

desert...). White demonstrates that this strange composite, the marriage of 

the Celt and the Orient, inspires a properly nomad thought that sweeps up 

English literature and constitutes American literature.

47

 We immediately 

see the dangers, the profound ambiguities accompanying in this 

enterprise, as if each effort and each creation faced a possible infamy. For 

what can be done to prevent the theme of a race from turning into a 

racism, a dominant and all-encompassing fascism, or into a sect and a 

folklore, microfascisms? And what can be done to prevent the oriental 

pole from becoming a phantasy that reactivates all the fascisms in a 

different way, and also all the folklores, yoga, Zen, and karate? It is 

certainly not enough to travel to escape phantasy, and it is certainly not by 

invoking a past, real or mythical, that one avoids racism. But here again, 

the criteria for making the distinction are simple, whatever the de facto 

mixes that obscure them at a given level, at a given moment. The race-tribe 

exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the 

oppression it suffers: there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is 

no dominant race; a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the 

impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and 

mixed-blood are the true names of race. Rimbaud said it all on this point: 

only he or she can invoke race who says, "I have always been of an inferior 

race... I am of an inferior race for all eternity. . . There I am on the Breton 

shore ... I am a beast, a nigger . . .   I  am  of  a  distant  race:  my  ancestors  were 

Norsemen."

48

 In the same way that race is not something to be rediscovered, 

the Orient is not something to be imitated: it only exists in the construction 

of a smooth space, just as race only exists in the constitu-

 

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tion of a tribe that peoples and traverses a smooth space. All of thought is a 

becoming, a double becoming, rather than the attribute of a Subject and 

the representation of a Whole.

 

A

XIOM 

II. The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is 

exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institu-
tion). As such, the war machine has three aspects, a spatiogeographic 
aspect, an arithmetic or algebraic aspect, and an affective aspect.

 

P

ROPOSITION 

V. Nomad existence necessarily effectuates the conditions 

of the war machine in space.

 

The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from 

one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling 

points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a 

principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the 

points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they 

determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. The water 

point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and 

exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-bet-

ween has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a 

direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. Even the ele-

ments of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is for-

ever mobilizing them.

49

 The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; 

for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the sec-

ond point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad 

goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; 

in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory. Nomads and 

migrants can mix in many ways, or form a common aggregate; their 

causes and conditions are no less distinct for that (for example, those who 

joined Mohammed at Medina had a choice between a nomadic or bedouin 

pledge, and a pledge of hegira or emigration).

50

 

Second, even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or cus-

tomary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which 

is to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and 

regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory 

does the opposite: it distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one 

that is indefinite and noncommunicating. The nomos  came to designate 

the law, but that was originally because it was distribution, a mode of distri-

bution. It is a very special kind of distribution, one without division into 

shares, in a space without borders or enclosure. The nomos is the consis-

tency of a fuzzy aggregate: it is in this sense that it stands in opposition to 

the law or the polls,  as the backcountry, a mountainside, or the vague 

expanse around a city ("either nomos or polis").

51

 Therefore, and this is the

 

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third point, there is a significant difference between the spaces: sedentary 

space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while 

nomad space is smooth, marked only by "traits" that are effaced and dis-

placed with the trajectory. Even the lamellae of the desert slide over each 

other, producing an inimitable sound. The nomad distributes himself in a 

smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial 

principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. Toynbee 

is profoundly right to suggest that the nomad is on the contrary he who does 
not move. 
Whereas the migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become 

amorphous or hostile, the nomad is one who does not depart, does not want 

to depart, who clings to the smooth space left by the receding forest, where 

the steppe or the desert advances, and who invents nomadism as a response 

to this challenge.

52

 Of course, the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is 

only seated while moving (the Bedouin galloping, knees on the saddle, sit-

ting on the soles of his upturned feet, "a feat of balance"). The nomad 

knows how to wait, he has infinite patience. Immobility and speed, catato-

nia and rush, a "stationary process," station as process—these traits of 

Kleist's are eminently those of the nomad. It is thus necessary to make a 

distinction between speed and movement: a movement may be very fast, 

but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, 

yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive; speed is intensive. Movement 

designates the relative character of a body considered as "one," and which 

goes from point to point; speed, on the contrary, constitutes the absolute 
character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth 
space in the manner of a vortex, 
with the possibility of springing up at any 

point. (It is therefore not surprising that reference has been made to spiri-

tual voyages effected without relative movement, but in intensity, in one 

place: these are part of nomadism.) In short, we will say by convention that 

only nomads have absolute movement, in other words, speed; vortical or 

swirling movement is an essential feature of their war machine.

 

It is in this sense that nomads have no points, paths, or land, even though 

they do by all appearances. If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized 

par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization after-
ward
as with the migrant, or upon something else as with the sedentary (the 

sedentary's relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a prop-

erty regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad, on the contrary, it is 

deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a 

degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself. It is 

the earth that deterritorializes itself, in a way that provides the nomad with 

a territory. The land ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground 
(sol) or support. The earth does not become deterritorialized in its global 

and relative movement, but at specific locations, at the spot where the for-

 

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est recedes, or where the steppe and the desert advance. Hubac is right to 

say that nomadism is explainable less by universal changes in climate 

(which relate instead to migrations) as by the "divagation of local cli-

mates."

53

 The nomads are there, on the land, wherever there forms a 

smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in all directions. The nomads 

inhabit these places; they remain in them, and they themselves make them 

grow, for it has been established that the nomads make the desert no less 

than they are made by it. They are vectors of deterritorialization. They add 

desert to desert, steppe to steppe, by a series of local operations whose ori-

entation and direction endlessly vary.

54

 The sand desert has not only oases, 

which are like fixed points, but also rhizomatic vegetation that is tempo-

rary and shifts location according to local rains, bringing changes in the 

direction of the crossings.

55

 The same terms are used to describe ice deserts 

as sand deserts: there is no line separating earth and sky; there is no inter-

mediate distance, no perspective or contour; visibility is limited; and yet 

there is an extraordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects 

but rather on haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow 

or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking of ice, the tactile qualities of 

both). It is a tactile space, or rather "haptic," a sonorous much more than a 

visual space.

56

 The variability, the polyvocality of directions, is an essential 

feature of smooth spaces of the rhizome type, and it alters their cartogra-

phy. The nomad, nomad space, is localized and not delimited. What is both 

limited and limiting is striated space, the relative global: it is limited in its 

parts, which are assigned constant directions, are oriented in relation to 

one another, divisible by boundaries, and can interlink; what is limiting 
{limes or wall, and no longer boundary) is this aggregate in relation to the 

smooth spaces it "contains," whose growth it slows or prevents, and which 

it restricts or places outside. Even when the nomad sustains its effects, he 

does not belong to this relative global, where one passes from one point to 

another, from one region to another. Rather, he is in a local absolute, an 

absolute that is manifested locally, and engendered in a series of local oper-

ations of varying orientations: desert, steppe, ice, sea.

 

Making the absolute appear in a particular place—is that not a very gen-

eral characteristic of religion (recognizing that the nature of the appear-

ance, and the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of the images that reproduce it are 

open to debate)? But the sacred place of religion is fundamentally a center 

that repels the obscure nomos. The absolute of religion is essentially a hori-

zon that encompasses, and, if the absolute itself appears at a particular 

place, it does so in order to establish a solid and stable center for the global. 

The encompassing role of smooth spaces (desert, steppe, or ocean) in 

monotheism has been frequently noted. In short, religion converts the 

absolute. Religion is in this sense a piece in the State apparatus (in both of

 

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its forms, the "bond" and the "pact or alliance"), even if it has within itself 

the power to elevate this model to the level of the universal or to constitute 

an absolute Imperium.  But for the nomad the terms of the question are 

totally different: locality is not delimited; the absolute, then, does not 

appear at a particular place but becomes a nonlimited locality; the coup-

ling of the place and the absolute is achieved not in a centered, oriented 

globalization or universalization but in an infinite succession of local oper-

ations. Limiting ourselves to this opposition between points of view, it may 

be observed that nomads do not provide a favorable terrain for religion; the 

man of war is always committing an offense against the priest or the god. 

The nomads have a vague, literally vagabond "monotheism," and content 

themselves with that, and with their ambulant fires. The nomads have a 

sense of the absolute, but a singularly atheistic one. The universalist reli-

gions that have had dealings with nomads—Moses, Mohammed, even 

Christianity with the Nestorian heresy—have always encountered prob-

lems in this regard, and have run up against what they have termed obsti-

nate impiety. These religions are not, in effect, separable from a firm and 

constant orientation, from an imperial de jure State, even, and especially, 

in the absence of a de facto State; they have promoted an ideal of 

sedentari-zation and addressed themselves more to the migrant components 

than the nomadic ones. Even early Islam favored the theme of the hegira, 

or migration, over nomadism; rather, it was through certain schisms (such 

as the Kharijl movement) that it won over the Arab or Berber nomads.

57

 

However, it does not exhaust the question to establish a simple opposi-

tion between two points of view, religion-nomadism. For monotheistic 

religion, at the deepest level of its tendency to project a universal or spiri-

tual State over the entire ecumenon, is not without ambivalence or fringe 

areas; it goes beyond even the ideal limits of the State, even the imperial 

State, entering a more indistinct zone, an outside of States where it has the 

possibility of undergoing a singular mutation or adaptation. We are refer-

ring to religion as an element in a war machine and the idea of holy war as 

the motor of that machine. The prophet, as opposed to the state personality 

of the king and the religious personality of the priest, directs the movement 

by which a religion becomes a war machine or passes over to the side of 

such a machine. It has often been said that Islam, and the prophet Moham-

med, performed such a conversion of religion and constituted a veritable 

esprit de corps: in the formula of Georges Bataille, "early Islam, a society 

reduced to the military enterprise." This is what the West invokes in order 

to justify its antipathy toward Islam. Yet the Crusades were a properly 

Christian adventure of this type. The prophets may very well condemn 

nomad life; the war machine may very well favor the movement of 

migration and the ideal of establishment; religion in general may very well

 

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compensate for its specific deterritorialization with a spiritual and even 

physical reterritorialization, which in the case of the holy war assumes the 

well-directed character of a conquest of the holy lands as the center of the 

world. Despite all that, when religion sets itself up as a war machine, it 

mobilizes and liberates a formidable charge of nomadism or absolute 

deterritorialization; it doubles the migrant with an accompanying nomad, 

or with the potential nomad the migrant is in the process of becoming; and 

finally, it turns its dream of an absolute State back against the State-form.

58 

And this turning-against is no less a part of the "essence" of religion than 

that dream. The history of the Crusades is marked by the most astonishing 

series of directional changes: the firm orientation toward the Holy Land as 

a center to reach often seems nothing more than a pretext. But it would be 

wrong to say that the play of self-interest, or economic, commercial, or 

political factors, diverted the crusade from its pure path. The idea of the 

crusade in itself implies this variability of directions, broken and changing, 

and intrinsically possesses all these factors or all these variables from the 

moment it turns religion into a war machine and simultaneously utilizes 

and gives rise to the corresponding nomadism.

59

 The necessity of main-

taining the most rigorous of distinctions between sedentaries, migrants, 

and nomads does not preclude de facto mixes; on the contrary, it makes 

them all the more necessary in turn. And it is impossible to think of the gen-

eral process of sedentarization that vanquished the nomads without also 

envisioning the gusts of local nomadization that carried off sedentaries 

and doubled migrants (notably, to the benefit of religion).

 

Smooth or nomad space lies between two striated spaces: that of the for-

est, with its gravitational verticals, and that of agriculture, with its grids 

and generalized parallels, its now independent arborescence, its art of 

extracting the tree and wood from the forest. But being "between" also 

means that smooth space is controlled by these two flanks, which limit it, 

oppose its development, and assign it as much as possible a 

communica-tional role; or, on the contrary, it means that it turns against 

them, gnawing away at the forest on one side, on the other side gaining 

ground on the cultivated lands, affirming a noncommunicating force or a 

force of divergence  like a "wedge" digging in. The nomads turn first 

against the forest and the mountain dwellers, then descend upon the 

farmers. What we have here is something like the flipside or the outside 

of the State-form—but in what sense? This form, as a global and relative 

space, implies a certain number of components: forest-clearing of fields; 

agriculture-grid laying; animal raising subordinated to agricultural work 

and sedentary food production; commerce based on a constellation of 

town-country  (polis-nomos)  communications. When historians inquire 

into the reasons for the victory of the West over the Orient, they primarily 

mention the following characteris-

 

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tics, which put the Orient in general at a disadvantage: deforestation rather 

than clearing for planting, making it extremely difficult to extract or even 

to find wood; cultivation of the type "rice paddy and garden" rather than 

arborescence and field; animal raising for the most part outside the control 

of the sedentaries, with the result that they lacked animal power and meat 

foods; the low communication content of the town-country relation, mak-

ing commerce far less flexible.

60

 The conclusion is not that the State-form 

is absent in the Orient. Quite to the contrary, a more rigid agency becomes 

necessary in order to retain and reunite the various components plied by 

escape vectors. States always have the same composition; if there is even 

one truth in the political philosophy of Hegel, it is that every State carries 

within itself the essential moments of its existence. States are made up not 

only of people but also of wood, fields, gardens, animals, and commodities. 

There is a unity of composition of all States, but States have neither the 

same development nor the same organization. In the Orient, the compo-

nents are much more disconnected, disjointed, necessitating a great immu-

table Form to hold them together: "despotic formations," Asian or African, 

are rocked by incessant revolts, by secessions and dynastic changes, which 

nevertheless do not affect the immutability of the form. In the West, on the 

other hand, the interconnectedness of the components makes possible 

transformations of the State-form through revolution. It is true that the 

idea of revolution itself is ambiguous; it is Western insofar as it relates to a 

transformation of the State, but Eastern insofar as it envisions the destruc-

tion, the abolition of the State.

61

 The great empires of the Orient, Africa, 

and America run up against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them 

and maintain gaps between their components (the nomos does not become 

countryside, the countryside does not communicate with the town, 

large-scale animal raising is the affair of the nomads, etc.): the oriental 

State is in direct confrontation with a nomad war machine. This war 

machine may fall back to the road of integration and proceed solely by 

revolt and dynastic change; nevertheless, it is the war machine, as nomad, 

that invents the abolitionist dream and reality. Western States are much 

more sheltered in their striated space and consequently have much more 

latitude in holding their components together; they confront the nomads 

only indirectly, through the intermediary of the migrations the nomads 

trigger or adopt as their stance.

62

 

One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over 

which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in 

the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to 

vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to 

establish a zone of rights over an entire "exterior," over all of the flows 

traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself

 

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from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities 

or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in 

well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, 

relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of sub-

jects and objects. That is why Paul Virilio's thesis is important, when he 

shows that "the political power of the State is polis, police, that is, manage-

ment of the public ways," and that "the gates of the city, its levies and 

duties, are barriers, filters against the fluidity of the masses, against the 

penetration power of migratory packs," people, animals, and goods.

63 

Gravity, gravitas, such is the essence of the State. It is not at all that the 

State knows nothing of speed; but it requires that movement, even the fast-

est, cease to be the absolute state of a moving body occupying a smooth 

space, to become the relative characteristic of a "moved body" going from 

one point to another in a striated space. In this sense, the State never ceases 

to decompose, recompose, and transform movement, or to regulate speed. 

The State as town surveyor, converter, or highway interchange: the role of 

the engineer from this point of view. Speed and absolute movement are not 

without their laws, but they are the laws of the nomos, of the smooth space 

that deploys it, of the war machine that populates it. If the nomads formed 

the war machine, it was by inventing absolute speed, by being "synony-

mous" with speed. And each time there is an operation against the State— 

insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, or revolution as act—it can be 

said that a war machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has 

appeared, accompanied by the reconstitution of a smooth space or a man-

ner of being in space as though it were smooth (Virilio discusses the impor-

tance of the riot or revolutionary theme of "holding the street"). It is in this 

sense that the response of the State against all that threatens to move 

beyond it is to striate space. The State does not appropriate the war 

machine without giving even it the form of relative movement: this was the 

case with the model of the fortress as a regulator of movement, which was 

precisely the obstacle the nomads came up against, the stumbling block 

and parry by which absolute vortical movement was broken. Conversely, 

when a State does not succeed in striating its interior or neighboring space, 

the flows traversing that State necessarily adopt the stance of a war 

machine directed against it, deployed in a hostile or rebellious smooth 

space (even if other States are able to slip their striations in). This was the 

adventure of China: toward the end of the fourteenth century, and in spite 

of its very high level of technology in ships and navigation, it turned its 

back on its huge maritime space, saw its commercial flows turn against it 

and ally themselves with piracy, and was unable to react except by a politics 

of immobility, of the massive restriction of commerce, which only 

reinforced the connection between commerce and the war machine.

64

 

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The situation is much more complicated than we have let on. The sea is 

perhaps principal among smooth spaces, the hydraulic model par excel-

lence. But the sea is also, of all smooth spaces, the first one attempts were 

made to striate, to transform into a dependency of the land, with its fixed 

routes, constant directions, relative movements, a whole counterhydraulic 

of channels and conduits. One of the reasons for the hegemony of the West 

was the power of its State apparatuses to striate the sea by combining the 

technologies of the North and the Mediterranean and by annexing the 

Atlantic. But this undertaking had the most unexpected result: the multi-

plication of relative movements, the intensification of relative speeds in 

striated space, ended up reconstituting a smooth space or absolute move-

ment. As Virilio emphasizes, the sea became the place of the fleet in being, 

where one no longer goes from one point to another, but rather holds space 

beginning from any point: instead of striating space, one occupies it with a 

vector of deterritorialization in perpetual motion. This modern strategy 

was communicated from the sea to the air, as the new smooth space, but 

also to the entire Earth considered as desert or sea. As converter and 

capturer, the State does not just relativize movement, it reimparts absolute 

movement. It does not just go from the smooth to the striated, it reconsti-

tutes smooth space; it reimparts smooth in the wake of the striated. It is 

true that this new nomadism accompanies a worldwide war machine 

whose organization exceeds the State apparatuses and passes into energy, 

military-industrial, and multinational complexes. We say this as a 

reminder that smooth space and the form of exteriority do not have an irre-

sistible revolutionary calling but change meaning drastically depending on 

the interactions they are part of and the concrete conditions of their exer-

cise or establishment (for example, the way in which total war and popular 

war, and even guerrilla warfare, borrow one another's methods).

65

 

P

ROPOSITION 

VI. Nomad existence necessarily implies the numerical 

elements of a war machine.

 

Tens, hundreds, thousands, myriads: all armies retain these decimal 

groupings, to the point that each time they are encountered it is safe to 

assume the presence of a military organization. Is this not the way an army 

deterritorializes its soldiers? An army is composed of units, companies, 

and divisions. The Numbers may vary in function, in combination; they 

may enter into entirely different strategies; but there is always a connection 

between the Number and the war machine. It is a question not of quantity 

but of organization or composition. When the State creates armies, it 

always applies this principle of numerical organization; but all it does is 

adopt the principle, at the same time as it appropriates the war machine. 

For so peculiar an idea—the numerical organization of people—came

 

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from the nomads. It was the Hyksos, conquering nomads, who brought it to 

Egypt; and when Moses applied it to his people in exodus, it was on the 

advice of his nomad father-in-law, Jethro the Kenite, and was done in such 

a way as to constitute a war machine, the elements of which are described in 

the biblical book of Numbers. The nomos  is fundamentally numerical, 

arithmetic. When Greek geometrism is contrasted with Indo-Arab 

arithmetism, it becomes clear that the latter implies a nomos opposable to 

the logos: not that the nomads "do" arithmetic or algebra, but because 

arithmetic and algebra arise in a strongly nomad influenced world.

 

Up to now we have known three major types of human organization: lin-

eal, territorial, and  numerical.  Lineal organization allows us to define 

so-called primitive societies. Clan lineages are essentially segments in 

action; they meld and divide, and vary according to the ancestor consid-

ered, the tasks, and the circumstances. Of course, number plays an impor-

tant role in the determination of lineage, or in the creation of new 

lineages—as does the earth, since a clan segmentarity is doubled by a tribal 

segmentarity. The earth is before all else the matter upon which the 

dynamic of lineages is inscribed, and the number, a means of inscription: 

the lineages write upon the earth and with the number, constituting a kind 

of "geodesy." Everything changes with State societies: it is often said that 

the territorial principle becomes dominant. One could also speak of 

deterritorialization, since the earth becomes an object, instead of being an 

active material element in combination with lineage. Property is precisely 

the deterritorialized relation between the human being and the earth; this 

is so whether property constitutes a good belonging to the State, 

superposed upon continuing possession by a lineal community, or whether 

it itself becomes a good belonging to private individuals constituting a new 

community. In both cases (and according to the two poles of the State), 

something like an overcoding of the earth replaces geodesy. Of course, line-

ages remain very important, and numbers take on their own importance. 

But what moves to the forefront is a "territorial" organization, in the sense 

that all the segments, whether of lineage, land, or number, are taken up by 
an astronomical space or a geometrical extension that overcodes them— 

but certainly not in the same way in the archaic imperial State and in mod-

ern States. The archaic State envelops a spatium  with a summit, a 

differentiated space with depth and levels, whereas modern States (begin-

ning with the Greek city-state) develop a homogeneous extensio with an 

immanent center, divisible homologous parts, and symmetrical and 

reversible relations. Not only do the two models, the astronomical and the 

geometrical, enter into intimate mixes, but even when they are supposedly 

pure, both imply the subordination of lineages and numbers to this metric 

power, as it appears either in the imperial spatium or in the political

 

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extension  Arithmetic, the number, has always had a decisive role in the 

State apparatus: this is so even as early as the imperial bureaucracy, with 

the three conjoined operations of the census, taxation, and election. It is 

even truer of modern forms of the State, which in developing utilized all 

the calculation techniques that were springing up at the border between 

mathematical science and social technology (there is a whole social calcu-

lus at the basis of political economy, demography, the organization of 

work, etc.). This arithmetic element of the State found its specific power in 

the treatment of all kinds of matter: primary matters (raw materials), the 

secondary matter of wrought objects, or the ultimate matter constituted by 

the human population. Thus the number has always served to gain mastery 

over matter, to control its variations and movements, in other words, to 

submit them to the spatiotemporal framework of the State—either the 

imperial  spatium,  or the modern extensio.

61

  The State has a territorial 

principle, or a principle of deterritorialization, that links the number to 

metric magnitudes (taking into account the increasingly complex metrics 

effecting the overcoding). We do not believe that the conditions of inde-

pendence or autonomy of the Number are to be found in the State, even 

though all the factors of its development are present.

 

The Numbering Number, in other words, autonomous arithmetic organ-

ization, implies neither a superior degree of abstraction nor very large 

quantities. It relates only to conditions of possibility constituted by 

nomadism and to conditions of effectuation constituted by the war 

machine. It is in State armies that the problem of the treatment of large 

quantities arises, in relation to other matters; but the war machine operates 

with small quantities that it treats using numbering numbers. These num-

bers appear as soon as one distributes something in space, instead of divid-

ing up space or distributing space itself. The number becomes a subject. 

The independence of the number in relation to space is a result not of 

abstraction but of the concrete nature of smooth space, which is occupied 

without itself being counted. The number is no longer a means of counting 

or measuring but of moving: it is the number itself that moves through 

smooth space. There is undoubtedly a geometry of smooth space: but as we 

have seen, it is a minor, operative geometry, a geometry of the trait. The 

more independent space is from a metrics, the more independent the num-

ber is from space. Geometry as a royal science has little importance for the 

war machine (its only importance is in State armies, and for sedentary for-

tification, but it leads generals to serious defeats).

68

 The number becomes a 

principle whenever it occupies a smooth space, and is deployed within it as 

subject, instead of measuring a striated space. The number is the mobile 

occupant, the movable (meuble)  in smooth space, as opposed to the 

geometry of the immovable (immeuble) in striated space. The nomadic

 

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numerical unit is the ambulant fire, and not the tent, which is still too much 

of an immovable: "The fire takes precedence over the yurt." The number-

ing number is no longer subordinated to metric determinations or geomet-

rical dimensions, but has only a dynamic relation with geographical 

directions: it is a directional number, not a dimensional or metric one. 

Nomad organization is indissolubly arithmetic and directional; quantity is 

everywhere, tens, hundreds, direction is everywhere, left, right: the numer-

ical chief is also the chief of the left or the right.

69

 The numbering number is 

rhythmic, not harmonic. It is not related to cadence or measure: it is only in 

State armies, and for reasons of discipline and show, that one marches in 

cadence; but autonomous numerical organization finds its meaning else-

where, whenever it is necessary to establish an order of displacement on the 

steppe, the desert—at the point where the lineages of the forest dwellers 

and the figures of the State lose their relevance. "He moved with the ran-

dom walk which made only those sounds natural to the desert. Nothing in 

his passage would [indicate] that human flesh moved there. It was a way of 

walking so deeply conditioned in him that he didn't need to think about it. 

The feet moved of themselves, no measurable rhythm to their pacing."

70

 In 

the war machine and nomadic existence, the number is no longer num-

bered, but becomes a Cipher (Chiffre), and it is in this capacity that it con-

stitutes the "esprit de corps" and invents the secret and its outgrowths 

(strategy, espionage, war ruses, ambush, diplomacy, etc.).

 

A ciphered, rhythmic, directional, autonomous, movable, numbering 

number: the war machine is like the necessary consequence of nomadic 

organization (Moses experienced it, with all its consequences). Some peo-

ple nowadays are too eager to criticize this numerical organization, 

denouncing it as a military or even concentration-camp society where peo-

ple are no longer anything more than deterritorialized "numbers." But that 

is false. Horror for horror, the numerical organization of people is certainly 

no cruder than the lineal or State organizations. Treating people like num-

bers is not necessarily worse than treating them like trees to prune, or geo-

metrical figures to shape and model. Moreover, the use of the number as a 

numeral, as a statistical element, is proper to the numbered number of the 

State, not to the numbering number. And the world of the concentration 

camp operates as much by lineages and territories as by numeration. The 

question is not one of good or bad but of specificity. The specificity of 

numerical organization rests on the nomadic mode of existence and the 

war machine function. The numbering number is distinct both from lineal 

codes and State overcoding. Arithmetic composition, on the one hand, 

selects, extracts from the lineages the elements that will enter into 

nomadism and the war machine and, on the other hand, directs them 

against the State apparatus, opposing a machine and an existence to the

 

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State apparatus, drawing a deterritorialization that cuts across both the lin-

eal territorialities and the territory or deterritoriality of the State.

 

A first characteristic of the numbering, nomadic or war, number is that 

it is always complex, that is, articulated. A complex of numbers every time. 

It is exactly for this reason that it in no way implies large, homogenized 

quantities, like State numbers or the numbered number, but rather pro-

duces its effect of immensity by its fine articulation, in other words, by its 

distribution of heterogeneity in a free space. Even State armies do not do 

away with this principle when they deal with large numbers (despite the 

predominance of "base" 10). The Roman legion was a number made up of 

numbers, articulated in such a way that the segments became mobile, and 

the figures geometrical, changing, transformational. The complex or artic-

ulated number comprises not only men but necessarily weapons, animals, 

and vehicles. The arithmetic base unit is therefore a unit of assemblage, for 

example, man-horse-bow, lxl X 1, according to the formula that carried the 

Scythians to triumph; and the formula becomes more complicated to the 

extent that certain "weapons" assemble or articulate several men or 

animals, as in the case of the chariot with two horses and two men, one to 

drive and the other to throw, 2 X 1 X 2 = 1; or in the case of the famous 

two-handled shield of the hoplite reform, which soldered together human 

chains. However small the unit, it is articulated. The numbering number 

always has several bases at the same time. It is also necessary to take into 

account arithmetic relations that are external yet still contained in the 

number, expressing the proportion of combatants among the members of a 

lineage or tribe, the role of reserves and stocks, the upkeep of people, 

things, and animals. Logistics is the art of these external relations, which 

are no less a part of the war machine than the internal relations of strategy, 

in other words, the composition of combat units in relation to one another. 

The two together constitute the science of the articulation of numbers of 

war. Every assemblage has this strategic aspect and this logistical aspect.

 

But the numbering number has a second, more secret, characteristic. 

Everywhere, the war machine displays a curious process of arithmetic rep-

lication or doubling, as if it operated along two nonsymmetrical and 

nonequal series. On the one hand, the lineages are indeed organized and 

reshuffled numerically; a numerical composition is superimposed upon 

the lineages in order to bring the new principle into predominance. But on 
the other hand, 
men are simultaneously extracted from each lineage to 

form a special numerical body—as if the new numerical composition of 

the lineage-body could not succeed without the constitution of a body 

proper to it, itself numerical. We believe that this is not an accidental 

phenomenon but rather an essential constituent of the war machine, a 

necessary operation for the autonomy of the number: the number of the

 

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body must have as its correlate a body of the number; the number must be 

doubled according to two complementary operations. For the social body 

to be numerized, the number must form a special body. When Genghis 

Khan undertook his great composition of the steppe, he numerically or-

ganized the lineages, and the fighters in each lineage, placing them under a 

cipher and a chief (groups of ten with decurions, groups of one hundred 

with centurions, groups of one thousand with chiliarchs). He also extracted 

from each arithmetized lineage a small number of men who were to consti-

tute his personal guard, in other words, a dynamic formation comprising a 

staff, commissars, messengers, and diplomats ("antrustions").

71

 One is 

never without the other: a double deterritorialization, the second of which 

is to a higher power. When Moses undertook his great composition of the 

desert—where the influence he felt from the nomads was necessarily 

stronger than that of Yahweh—he took a census of each tribe and or-

ganized them numerically; he also decreed a law according to which the 

firstborn of each tribe at that particular time belonged by right to Yahweh. 

As these firstborn were obviously still too young, their role in the Number 

was transferred to a special tribe, the Levites, who provided the body of the 

Number or the special guard of the ark; and as the Levites were less numer-

ous than the new firstborn of the tribes taken together, the excess firstborn 

had to be bought back by the tribes in the form of taxes (bringing us back to 

a fundamental aspect of logistics). The war machine would be unable to 

function without this double series: it is necessary both that numerical 

composition replace lineal organization and that it conjure away the ter-

ritorial organization of the State. Power in the war machine is defined ac-

cording to this double series: power is no longer based on segments and 

centers, on the potential resonance of centers and overcoding of segments, 

but on these relations internal to the Number and independent of quantity. 

Tensions or power struggles are also a result of this: between Moses' tribes 

and the Levites, between Genghis's "noyans" and "antrustions." This is 

not simply a protest on the part of lineages wishing to regain their former 

autonomy; nor is it the prefiguration of a struggle for control over a State 

apparatus. It is a tension inherent in the war machine, in its special power, 

and in the particular limitations placed on the power of the "chief."

 

Thus numerical composition, or the numbering number, implies several 

operations: the arithmetization of the starting aggregates or sets (the line-

ages); the union of the extracted subsets (the constitution of groups often, 

one hundred, etc.); and the formation by substitution of another set in cor-

respondence with the united set (the special body). It is this last operation 

that implies the most variety and originality in nomad existence. The same 

problem arises even in State armies, when the war machine is appropriated 

by the State. In effect, if the arithmetization of the social body has as its cor-

 

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relate the formation of a distinct special body, itself arithmetic, this special 

body may be constructed in several ways: (1) from a privileged lineage or 

tribe, the dominance of which subsequently takes on a new meaning (the 

case of Moses, with the Levites); (2) from representatives of each lineage, 

who subsequently serve also as hostages (the firstborn; this would actually 

be the Asian case, or the case of Genghis); (3) from a totally different ele-

ment, one exterior to the base society, slaves, foreigners, or people of 

another religion (this was already the case as early as the Saxon regime, in 

which the king used Frankish slaves to compose his special body; but Islam 

is the prime example, even inspiring a specific sociological category, that of 

"military slavery": the Mameluks of Egypt, slaves from the steppe or the 

Caucasus who were purchased at a very early age by the sultan; or the Otto-

man Janissaries, who came from Christian communities).

72

 

Is this not the origin of an important theme, "the nomads as child 

stealers"? It is clear, especially in the last example, how the special body is 

instituted as an element determinant of power in the war machine. The war 

machine and nomadic existence have to ward off two things simultane-

ously: a return of the lineal aristocracy and the formation of imperial 

functionaries. What complicates everything is that the State itself has often 

been determined in such a way as to use slaves as high functionaries. As we 

shall see, the reasons for this varied, and although the two currents con-

verged in armies, they came from two distinct sources. For the power of 

slaves, foreigners, or captives in a war machine of nomadic origin is very 

different from the power of lineal aristocracies, as well as from that of State 

functionaries and bureaucrats. They are "commissars," emissaries, diplo-

mats, spies, strategists, and logisticians, sometimes smiths. They cannot be 

explained away as a "whim of the sultan." On the contrary, it is the possibil-

ity of the war chief having whims that is explained by the objective exis-

tence and necessity of this special numerical body, this Cipher that has 

value only in relation to a nomos. There is both a deterritorialization and a 

becoming proper to the war machine; the special body, in particular the 

slave-infidel-foreigner, is the one who becomes a soldier and believer while 

remaining deterritorialized in relation to the lineages and the State. You 

have to be born an infidel to become a believer; you have to be born a slave 

to become a soldier. Specific schools or institutions are needed for this pur-

pose: the special body is an invention proper to the war machine, which 

States always utilize, adapting it so totally to their own ends that it becomes 

unrecognizable, or restituting it in bureaucratic staff form, or in the tech-

nocratic form of very special bodies, or in "esprit de corps" that serve the 

State as much as they resist it, or among the commissars who double the 

State as much as they serve it.

 

It is true that the nomads have no history; they only have a geography.

 

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And the defeat of the nomads was such, so complete, that history is one 

with the triumph of States. We have witnessed, as a result, a generalized cri-

tique dismissing the nomads as incapable of any innovation, whether tech-

nological or metallurgical, political or metaphysical. Historians, bourgeois 

or Soviet (Grousset or Vladimirtsov), consider the nomads a pitiable seg-

ment of humanity that understands nothing: not technology, to which it 

supposedly remained indifferent; not agriculture, not the cities and States 

it destroyed or conquered. It is difficult to see, however, how the nomads 

could have triumphed in war if they did not possess strong metallurgical 

capabilities (the idea that the nomads received their technical weapons and 

political counseling from renegades from an imperial State is highly im-

probable). It is difficult to see how the nomads could have undertaken to 

destroy cities and States, except in the name of a nomad organization and a 

war machine defined not by ignorance but by their positive characteristics, 

by their specific space, by a composition all their own that broke with line-

ages and warded off the State-form. History has always dismissed the 

nomads. Attempts have been made to apply a properly military category to 

the war machine (that of "military democracy") and a properly sedentary 

category to nomadism (that of "feudalism"). But these two hypotheses pre-

suppose a territorial principle: either that an imperial State appropriates 

the war machine, distributing land to warriors as a benefit of their position 
(cleroi and false fiefs), or that property, once it has become private, in itself 

posits relations of dependence among the property owners constituting the 

army (true fiefs and vassalage).

73

 In both cases, the number is subordinated 

to an "immobile" fiscal organization, in order to establish which land can 

be or has been ceded, as well as to set the taxes owed by the beneficiaries 

themselves. There is no doubt that nomad organization and the war 

machine deal with these same problems, both the level of land and of taxa-

tion (in which the nomadic warriors were great innovators, despite what is 

said to the contrary). But they invent a territoriality and a "movable" fiscal 

organization that testify to the autonomy of a numerical principle: there 

can be a confusion or combination of the systems, but the specificity of the 

nomadic system remains the subordination of land to numbers that are 

displaced and deployed, and of taxation to relations internal to those num-

bers (already with Moses, for example, taxation played a role in the relation 

between the numerical bodies and the special body of the number). In 

short, military democracy and feudalism, far from explaining the numeri-

cal composition of the nomads, instead testify to what may survive of them 

in sedentary regimes.

 

P

ROPOSITION 

VII. Nomad existence has for "affects" the weapons of a war 

machine.

 

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A distinction can always be made between weapons and tools on the 

basis of their usage (destroying people or producing goods). But although 

this extrinsic distinction explains certain secondary adaptations of a tech-

nical object, it does not preclude a general convertibility between the two 

groups, to the extent that it seems very difficult to propose an intrinsic dif-

ference between weapons and tools. The types of percussion, as defined by 

Andre Leroi-Gourhan, are found on both sides. "For ages on end agricul-

tural implements and weapons of war must have remained identical."

74 

Some have spoken of an "ecosystem," not only situated at the origin, in 

which work tools and weapons of war exchange their determinations: it 

seems that the same machinicphylum traverses both. And yet we have the 

feeling that there are many internal differences, even if they are not intrin-

sic, in other words, logical or conceptual, and even if they remain approxi-

mate. As a first approximation, weapons have a privileged relation with 

projection. Anything that throws or is thrown is fundamentally a weapon, 

and propulsion is its essential moment. The weapon is ballistic; the very 

notion of the "problem" is related to the war machine. The more mecha-

nisms of projection a tool has, the more it behaves like a weapon, poten-

tially or simply metaphorically. In addition, tools are constantly compen-

sating for the projective mechanisms they possess, or else they adapt them 

to other ends. It is true that missile weapons, in the strict sense, whether 

projected or projecting, are only one kind among others; but even hand-

held weapons require a usage of the hand and arm different from that 

required by tools, a projective usage exemplified in the martial arts. The 

tool, on the other hand, is much more introceptive, introjective: it prepares 

a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to 

appropriate it for a form of interiority. Action at a distance exists in both 

cases, but in one case it is centrifugal and in the other, centripetal. One 

could also say that the tool encounters resistances, to be conquered or put 

to use, while the weapon has to do with counterattack, to be avoided or 

invented (the counterattack is in fact the precipitating and inventive factor 

in the war machine, to the extent that it is not simply reducible to a quanti-

tative rivalry or defensive parade).

 

Second, weapons and tools do not "tendentially" (approximately) have 

the same relation to movement, to speed. It is yet another essential contri-

bution of Paul Virilio to have stressed this weapon-speed complemen-

tarity: the weapon invents speed, or the discovery of speed invents the 

weapon (the projective character of weapons is the result). The war 

machine releases a vector of speed so specific to it that it needs a special 

name; it is not only the power of destruction, but "dromocracy" (= nomos). 

Among other advantages, this idea articulates a new mode of distinction 

between the hunt and war. For it is certain not only that war does not derive

 

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from the hunt but also that the hunt does not promote weapons: either war 

evolved in the sphere of indistinction and convertibility between weapons 

and tools, or it used to its own advantage weapons already distinguished, 

already constituted. As Virilio says, war in no way appears when man 

applies to man the relation of the hunter to the animal, but on the contrary 

when he captures the force of the hunted animal and enters an entirely new 

relation to man, that of war (enemy, no longer prey). It is therefore not sur-

prising that the war machine was the invention of the animal-raising 

nomads: animal breeding and training are not to be confused either with 

the primitive hunt or with sedentary domestication, but are in fact the dis-

covery of a projecting and projectile system. Rather than operating by 

blow-by-blow violence, or constituting a violence "once and for all," the 

war machine, with breeding and training, institutes an entire economy of 

violence, in other words, a way of making violence durable, even unlim-

ited. "Bloodletting, immediate killing, run contrary to the unlimited usage 

of violence, that is, to its economy.... The economy of violence is not that of 
the hunter in the animal raiser, but that of the hunted animal. 
In horseback 

riding, one conserves the kinetic energy, the speed of the horse, and no 

longer its proteins (the motor, and no longer the flesh).. . . Whereas in the 

hunt the hunter's aim was to arrest the movement of wild animality 

through systematic slaughter, the animal breeder [sets about] conserving it, 

and, by means of training, the rider joins with this movement, orienting it 

and provoking its acceleration." The technological motor would develop 

this tendency further, but "horseback riding was the first projector of the 

warrior, his first system of arms."

75

 Whence becoming-animal in the war 

machine. Does this mean that the war machine did not exist before horse-

back riding and the cavalry? That is not the issue. The issue is that the war 

machine implies the release of a Speed vector that becomes a free or inde-

pendent variable; this does not occur in the hunt, where speed is associated 

primarily with the hunted animal. It is possible for this race vector to be 

released in an infantry, without recourse to horseback riding; it is possible, 

moreover, for there to be horseback riding, but as a means of transporta-

tion or even of portage having nothing to do with the free vector. In any 

event, what the warrior borrows from the animal is more the idea of the 

motor than the model of the prey. He does not generalize the idea of the 

prey by applying it to the enemy; he abstracts the idea of the motor, apply-

ing it to himself.

 

Two objections immediately arise. According to the first, the war 

machine possesses as much weight and gravity as it does speed (the distinc-

tion between the heavy and the light, the dissymmetry between defense and 

attack, the opposition between rest and tension). But it would be easy to 

demonstrate that phenomena of "temporization," and even of immobility

 

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and catatonia, so important in wars, relate in certain cases to a component 

of pure speed. And the rest of the time, they relate to the conditions under 

which State apparatuses appropriate the war machine, notably by arrang-

ing a striated space where opposing forces can come to an equilibrium. It 

can happen that speed is abstracted as the property of a projectile, a bullet 

or artillery shell, which condemns the weapon itself, and the soldier, to 

immobility (for example, immobility in the First World War). But an equi-

librium of forces is a phenomenon of resistance, whereas the counterattack 

implies a rush or change of speed that breaks the equilibrium: it was the 

tank that regrouped all of the operations in the speed vector and recreated a 

smooth space for movement by uprooting men and arms.

76

 

The opposite objection is more complex: it is that speed does indeed 

seem to be as much a part of the tool as of the weapon, and is no way specific 

to the war machine. The history of the motor is not only military. But per-

haps there is too much of a tendency to think in terms of quantities of 

movement, instead of seeking qualitative models. The two ideal models of 

the motor are those of work and free action. Work is a motor cause that 

meets resistances, operates upon the exterior, is consumed and spent in its 

effect, and must be renewed from one moment to the next. Free action is 

also a motor cause, but one that has no resistance to overcome, operates 

only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect, and contin-

ues from one moment to the next. Whatever its measure or degree, speed is 

relative in the first case, absolute in the second (the idea of a perpetuum 
mobile). 
In work, what counts is the point of application of a resultant force 

exerted by the weight of a body considered as "one" (gravity), and the rela-

tive displacement of this point of application. In free action, what counts is 

the way in which the elements of the body escape gravitation to occupy 

absolutely a nonpunctuated space. Weapons and weapon handling seem to 

be linked to a free-action model, and tools to a work model. Linear dis-

placement, from one point to another, constitutes the relative movement 

of the tool, but it is the vortical occupation of a space that constitutes the 

absolute movement of the weapon. It is as though the weapon were moving, 

self-propelling, while the tool is moved. This link between tools and work 

remains obscured unless work receives the motor, or real, definition we 

have just given it. The tool does not define work; just the opposite. The tool 

presupposes work. It must be added that weapons, also, obviously imply a 

renewal of the cause, an expending or even disappearance in the effect, the 

encountering of external resistances, a displacement of force, etc. It would 

be futile to credit weapons with a magical power in contrast to the con-

straints of tools: weapons and tools are subject to the same laws, which 

define, precisely, their common sphere. But the principle behind all tech-

nology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract,

 

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entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it 

presupposes. It is the machine that is primary in relation to the technical 

element: not the technical machine, itself a collection of elements, but the 

social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines 

what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage, extension, 

comprehension, etc.

 

It is through the intermediary of assemblages that the phylum selects, 

qualifies, and even invents the technical elements. Thus one cannot speak 

of weapons or tools before defining the constituent assemblages they pre-

suppose and enter into. This is what we meant when we said that weapons 

and tools are not merely distinguished from one another in an extrinsic 

manner, and yet they have no distinctive intrinsic characteristics. They 

have internal (and not intrinsic) characteristics relating to the respective 

assemblages with which they are associated. What effectuates a free-action 

model is not the weapons in themselves and in their physical aspect but the 

"war machine" assemblage as formal cause of the weapons. And what 

effectuates the work model is not the tools but the "work machine" assem-

blage as formal cause of the tools. When we say that the weapon is insepara-

ble from a speed vector, while the tool remains tied to conditions of gravity, 

we are claiming only to signal a difference between two types of assem-

blage, a distinction that holds even if in the assemblage proper to it the tool 

is abstractly "faster," and the weapon abstractly "weightier." The tool is 

essentially tied to a genesis, a displacement, and an expenditure of force 

whose laws reside in work, while the weapon concerns only the exercise or 

manifestation of force in space and time, in conformity with free action. 

The weapon does not fall from the sky, and obviously assumes production, 

displacement, expenditure, and resistance. But this aspect relates to the 

common sphere of the weapon and the tool, and does not yet concern the 

specificity of the weapon, which appears only when force is considered in 

itself, when it is no longer tied to anything but the number, movement, 

space, or time, or when speed is added to displacement.

11

  Concretely, a 

weapon as such relates not to the Work model but to the Free-Action 

model, with the assumption that the conditions of work are fulfilled else-

where. In short, from the point of view of force, the tool is tied to a 

gravity-displacement, weight-height system, and the weapon to a 
speed-perpetuum mobile system (it is in this sense that it can be said that 

speed in itself is a "weapons system").

 

The very general primacy of the collective and machinic assemblage 

over the technical element applies generally, for tools as for weapons. 

Weapons and tools are consequences, nothing but consequences. It has 

often been remarked that a weapon is nothing outside of the combat organ-

ization it is bound up with. For example, "hoplite" weapons existed only by

 

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virtue of the phalanx as a mutation of the war machine: the only new 

weapon at the time, the two-handled shield, was created by this assem-

blage; the other weapons were preexistent, but in other combinations 

where they had a different function, a different nature. 

78

 It is always the 

assemblage that constitutes the weapons system. The lance and the sword 

came into being in the Bronze Age only by virtue of the man-horse assem-

blage, which caused a lengthening of the dagger and pike, and made the 

first infantry weapons, the morning star and the battle-ax, obsolete. The 

stirrup, in turn, occasioned a new figure of the man-horse assemblage, 

entailing a new type of lance and new weapons; and this man-horse-stirrup 

constellation is itself variable, and has different effects depending on 

whether it is bound up with the general conditions of nomadism, or later 

readapted to the sedentary conditions of feudalism. The situation is 

exactly the same for the tool: once again, everything depends on an organi-

zation of work, and variable assemblages of human, animal, and thing. 

Thus the heavy plow exists as a specific tool only in a constellation where 

"long open fields" predominate, where the horse tends to replace the ox as 

draft animal, where the land begins to undergo triennial rotation, and 

where the economy becomes communal. Beforehand, the heavy plow may 

well have existed, but on the margins of other assemblages that did not 

bring out its specificity, that left unexploited its differential character with 

the scratch plow.

79

 

Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire. Desire has 

nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no 

desire but assembling, assembled, desire. The rationality, the efficiency, of 

an assemblage does not exist without the passions the assemblage brings into 

play, without the desires that constitute it as much as it constitutes them. 

Detienne has shown that the Greek phalanx was inseparable from a whole 

reversal of values, and from a passional mutation that drastically changed 

the relations between desire and the war machine. It is a case of man 

dismounting from the horse, and of the man-animal relation being 

replaced by a relation between men in an infantry assemblage that paves 

the way for the advent of the peasant-soldier, the citizen-soldier: the entire 

Eros of war changes, a group homosexual Eros tends to replace the 

zoosexual Eros of the horseman. Undoubtedly, whenever a State appropri-

ates the war machine, it tends to assimilate the education of the citizen to 

the training of the worker to the apprenticeship of the soldier. But if it is 

true that all assemblages are assemblages of desire, the question is whether 

the assemblages of war and work, considered in themselves, do not funda-

mentally mobilize passions of different orders. Passions are effectuations 

of desire that differ according to the assemblage: it is not the same justice or 

the same cruelty, the same pity, etc. The work regime is inseparable from an

 

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organization and a development of Form, corresponding to which is the 

formation of the subject. This is the passional regime of feeling as "the 

form of the worker." Feeling implies an evaluation of matter and its resis-

tances, a direction (sens, also "meaning") to form and its developments, an 

economy of force and its displacements, an entire gravity. But the regime of 

the war machine is on the contrary that of affects, which relate only to the 

moving body in itself, to speeds and compositions of speed among ele-

ments. Affect is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack, 

whereas feeling is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion. Affects 

are projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools. There 

is a relation between the affect and the weapon, as witnessed not only in 

mythology but also in the chanson degeste, and the chivalric novel or novel 

of courtly love. Weapons are affects and affects weapons. From this stand-

point, the most absolute immobility, pure catatonia, is a part of the speed 

vector, is carried by this vector, which links the petrification of the act to 

the precipitation of movement. The knight sleeps on his mount, then 

departs like an arrow. Kleist is the author who best integrated these sudden 

catatonic fits, swoons, suspenses, with the utmost speeds of a war machine. 

He presents us with a becoming-weapon of the technical element simulta-

neous to a becoming-affect of the passional element (the Penthesilea equa-

tion). The martial arts have always subordinated weapons to speed, and 

above all to mental (absolute) speed; for this reason, they are also the arts of 

suspense and immobility. The affect passes through both extremes. Thus 

the martial arts do not adhere to a code, as an affair of the State, but follow 
ways, which are so many paths of the affect; upon these ways, one learns to 

"unuse" weapons as much as one learns to use them, as if the power and cul-

tivation of the affect were the true goal of the assemblage, the weapon being 

only a provisory means. Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is 

proper to the war machine: the "not-doing" of the warrior, the undoing of 

the subject. A movement of decoding runs through the war machine, while 

overcoding solders the tool to an organization of work and of the State (the 

tool is never unlearned; one can only compensate for its absence). It is true 

that the martial arts continually invoke the center of gravity and the rules 

for its displacement. That is because these ways are not the ultimate ones. 

However far they go, they are still in the domain of Being, and only trans-

late absolute movements of another nature into the common space—those 

effectuated in the Void, not in nothingness, but in the smooth of the void 

where there is no longer any goal: attacks, counterattacks, and headlong 

plunges.

80

 

Still from the standpoint of the assemblage, there is an essential relation 

between tools and signs. That is because the work model that defines the 

tool belongs to the State apparatus. It has often been said that people in

 

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primitive societies do not, strictly speaking, work, even if their activities 

are very constrained and regulated; and the man of war, in his capacity as a 

man of war, does not work either (the "labors" of Hercules assume submis-

sion to a king). The technical element becomes a tool when it is abstracted 

from the territory and is applied to the earth as an object; but at the same 

time, the sign ceases to be inscribed upon the body and is written upon an 

immobile, objective matter. For there to be work, there must be a capture 

of activity by the State apparatus, and a semiotization of activity by writ-

ing. Hence the affinity between the assemblages signs-tools, and signs of 

writing-organization of work. Entirely different is the case of the weapon, 

which is in an essential relation with jewelry. Jewelry has undergone so 

many secondary adaptations that we no longer have a clear understanding 

of what it is. But something lights up in our mind when we are told that 

metalworking was the "barbarian," or nomad, art par excellence, and when 

we see these masterpieces of minor art. These fibulas, these gold or silver 

plaques, these pieces of jewelry, are attached to small movable objects; they 

are not only easy to transport, but pertain to the object only as object in 

motion. These plaques constitute traits of expression of pure speed, car-

ried on objects that are themselves mobile and moving. The relation 

between them is not that of form-matter but of motif-support, where the 

earth is no longer anything more than ground (sol), where there is no longer 

even any ground at all because the support is as mobile as the motif. They 

lend colors the speed of light, turning gold to red and silver to white light. 

They are attached to the horse's harness, the sheath of the sword, the 

warrior's garments, the handle of the weapon; they even decorate things 

used only once, such as arrowheads. Regardless of the effort or toil they 

imply, they are of the order of free action, related to pure mobility, and not 

of the order of work with its conditions of gravity, resistance, and expendi-

ture. The ambulant smith links metalworking to the weapon, and vice 

versa. Gold and silver have taken on many other functions but cannot be 

understood apart from this nomadic contribution made by the war 

machine, in which they are not matters but traits of expression appropriate 

to weapons (the whole mythology of war not only subsists in money but is 

the active factor in it). Jewels are the affects corresponding to weapons, that 

are swept up by the same speed vector.

 

Metalworking, jewelry making, ornamentation, even decoration, do not 

form a writing, even though they have a power of abstraction that is in 

every way equal to that of writing. But this power is assembled differently. 

In the case of writing, the nomads had no need to create their own system; 

they borrowed that of their sedentary imperial neighbors, who even fur-

nished them with a phonetic transcription of their languages.

81

 "The 

goldsmith's and silversmith's is the barbarian art par excellence; filigree

 

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and gold and silver plating. . . . Scythian art, tied as it was to a nomadic and 

warlike economy that both used and repudiated a commerce reserved for 

foreigners, now moved toward this luxurious and decorative type of work. 

The barbarians. .. did not need to possess or create a precise code, such as 

for instance an elementary picto-ideographic one—still less a syllabic writ-

ing of their own, which would indeed have had to compete with the ones in 

use among their more advanced neighbors. Toward the fourth and third 

centuries B.C. the Scythian art of the Black Sea region thus tends naturally 

toward a graphic schematization of its forms, which makes them more of a 

linear ornamentation than a proto-writing."

82

 Of course, one may write on 

jewelry, metal plaques, or even weapons, but only in the sense that one 

applies a preexisting writing system to these matters. The case of runic writ-
ing 
is more troubling because its origins seem exclusively tied to jewelry, 

fibulas, elements of metalworking, small movable objects. The point is 

that in its early period runic writing had only a weak communication value 

and a very restricted public function. Its secret character has led many to 

interpret it as magical writing. Rather, it is an affective semiotic, compris-

ing in particular: (1) signatures, as marks of possession or fabrication, and 

(2) short war or love messages. It constitutes a text that is "ornamental" 

rather than scriptural, "an invention with little utility, half-aborted," a sub-

stitute writing. It only takes on the value of writing during a second period, 

when monumental inscriptions appear, with the Danish reform of the 

ninth century A.D., in connection with the State and work.

83

 

It may be objected that tools, weapons, signs, and jewelry in fact occur 

everywhere, in a common sphere. But that is not the problem, any more 

than it is to seek an origin in each case. It is a question of assigning assem-

blages, in other words, of determining the differential traits according to 

which an element formally belongs to one assemblage rather than to 

another. It could also be said that architecture and cooking have an appar-

ent affinity with the State, whereas music and drugs have differential traits 

that place them on the side of the nomadic war machine.

84

 It is therefore a 

differential method that establishes the distinction between weapons and 
tools,  
from at least five points of view: the direction (sens) 

(projection-introception), the vector (speed-gravity), the model (free 

action-work), the expression (jewelry-signs), and the passional or desiring 

tonality (affect-feeling). Doubtless the State apparatus tends to bring 

uniformity to the regimes, by disciplining its armies, by making work a 

fundamental unit, in other words, by imposing its own traits. But it is not 

impossible for weapons and tools, if they are taken up by new assemblages 

of metamorphosis, to enter other relations of alliance. The man of war may 

at times form peasant or worker alliances, but it is more frequent for a 

worker, industrial or agricultural, to reinvent a war machine. Peasants 

made an important con-

 

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tribution to the history of artillery during the Hussite wars, when Zizka 

armed mobile fortresses made from oxcarts with portable cannons. A 

worker-soldier, weapon-tool, sentiment-affect affinity marks the right 

time, however fleeting, for revolutions and popular wars. There is a schizo-

phrenic taste for the tool that moves it away from work and toward free 

action, a schizophrenic taste for the weapon that turns it into a means for 

peace, for obtaining peace. A counterattack and a resistance simultane-

ously. Everything is ambiguous. But we do not believe that Ernst Junger's 

analyses are disqualified by this ambiguity when he portrays the "Rebel" as 

a transhistorical figure drawing the Worker, on the one hand, and the Sol-

dier, on the other, down a shared line of flight where one says simultane-

ously "I seek a weapon" and "I am looking for a tool": Draw the line, or 

what amounts to the same thing, cross the line, pass over the line, for the 

line is only drawn by surpassing the line of separation.

85

 Undoubtedly, 

nothing is more outmoded than the man of war: he has long since been 

transformed into an entirely different character, the military man. And the 

worker himself has undergone so many misadventures . . . And yet men of 

war reappear, with many ambiguities: they are all those who know the 

use-lessness of violence but who are adjacent to a war machine to be 

recreated, one of active, revolutionary counterattacks. Workers also 

reappear who do not believe in work but who are adjacent to a work 

machine to be recreated, one of active resistance and technological 

liberation. They do not resuscitate old myths or archaic figures; they are 

the new figures of a transhistorical assemblage (neither historical nor 

eternal, but untimely): the nomad warrior and the ambulant worker. A 

somber caricature already precedes them, the mercenary or mobile 

military adviser, and the technocrat or transhumant analyst, CIA and 

IBM. But transhistorical figures must defend themselves as much against 

old myths as against preestablished, anticipatory disfigurations. "One 

does not go back to reconquer the myth, one encounters it anew, when 

time quakes at its foundations under the empire of extreme danger." 

Martial arts and state-of-the-art technologies have value only because 

they create the possibility of bringing together worker and warrior masses 

of a new type. The shared line of flight of the weapon and the tool: a pure 

possibility, a mutation. There arise subterranean, aerial, submarine 

technicians who belong more or less to the world order, but who 

involuntarily invent and amass virtual charges of knowledge and action 

that are usable by others, minute but easily acquired for new assemblages. 

The borrowings between warfare and the military apparatus, work and free 

action, always run in both directions, for a struggle that is all the more 

varied.

 

P

ROBLEM 

HI. How do the nomads invent or find their weapons?

 

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P

ROPOSITION 

VIII. Metallurgy in itself constitutes a flow necessarily confluent 

with nomadism.

 

The political, economic, and social regime of the peoples of the steppe 

are less well known than their innovations in war, in the areas of offensive 

and defensive weapons, composition or strategy, and technological ele-

ments (the saddle, stirrup, horseshoe, harness, etc.). History contests each 

innovation but cannot succeed in effacing the nomad traces. What the 

nomads invented was the man-animal-weapon, man-horse-bow assem-

blage. Through this assemblage of speed, the ages of metal are marked by 

innovation. The socketed bronze battle-ax of the Hyksos and the iron 

sword of the Hittites have been compared to miniature atomic bombs. It 

has been possible to establish a rather precise periodization of the weapons 

of the steppe, showing the alternation between heavy and light armament 

(the Scythian type and the Sarmatian type), and their mixed forms. The 

cast steel saber, often short and curved, a weapon for side attack with the 

edge of the blade, envelops a different dynamic space than the forged iron 

sword used for frontal attack with the point: it was the Scythians who 

brought it to India and Persia, where the Arabs would later acquire it. It is 

commonly agreed that the nomads lost their role as innovators with the 

advent of firearms, in particular the cannon ("gunpowder overtook 

them"). But it was not necessarily because they did not know how to use 

them. Not only did armies like the Turkish army, whose nomadic tradi-

tions remained strong, develop extensive firepower, a new space, but addi-

tionally, and even more characteristically, light artillery was thoroughly 

integrated into mobile formations of wagons, pirate ships, etc. If the can-

non marks a limit for the nomads, it is on the contrary because it implies an 

economic investment that only a State apparatus can make (even commer-

cial cities do not suffice). The fact remains that for weapons other than fire-

arms, and even for the cannon, there is always a nomad on the horizon of a 

given technological lineage*

6

 

Obviously, each case is controversial, as demonstrated by the debates on 

the stirrup.

87

 The problem is that it is generally difficult to distinguish 

between what comes from the nomads as such, and what they receive from 

the empire they communicate with, conquer, or integrate with. There are 

so many gray areas, intermediaries, and combinations between an imper-

ial army and a nomad war machine that it is often the case that things origi-

nate in the empire. The example of the saber is typical, and unlike the 

stirrup, there is no longer any doubt. Although it is true that the Scythians 

were the propagators of the saber, introducing it to the Hindus, Persians, 

and Arabs, they were also its first victims, they started off on the receiving 

end; it was invented by the Chinese empire of the Ch'in and Han dynasties,

 

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the exclusive master of steel casting or crucible steel.

88

 This is a good exam-

ple to illustrate the difficulties facing modern archaeologists and his-

torians. Even archaeologists are not immune from a certain hatred or 

contempt for the nomads. In the case of the saber, where the facts already 

speak sufficiently in favor of an imperial origin, the best of the commenta-

tors finds it fitting to add that the Scythians could not have invented it at 

any rate—poor nomads that they were—and that crucible steel necessarily 

came from a sedentary milieu. But why follow the very old, official Chinese 

version according to which deserters from the imperial army revealed the 

secrets to the Scythians? And what can "revealing the secret" mean if the 

Scythians were incapable of putting it to use, and understood nothing of all 

that? Blame the deserters, why don't you. You don't make an atomic bomb 

with a secret, any more than you make a saber if you are incapable of repro-

ducing it, and of integrating it under different conditions, of transferring it 

to other assemblages. Propagation and diffusion are fully a part of the line 

of innovation; they mark a bend in it. On top of that, why say that crucible 

steel is necessarily the property of sedentaries or imperial subjects, when it 

is first of all the invention of metallurgists? It is assumed that these metal-

lurgists were necessarily controlled by a State apparatus; but they also had 

to enjoy a certain technological autonomy, and social clandestinity, so that, 

even controlled, they did not belong to the State any more than they were 

themselves nomads. There were no deserters who betrayed the secret, but 

rather metallurgists who communicated it and made its adaptation and 

propagation possible: an entirely different kind of "betrayal." In the last 

analysis, what makes the discussions so difficult (both in the controversial 

case of the stirrup and in the definite case of the saber) are not only the prej-

udices about the nomads but also the absence of a sufficiently elaborated 

concept of the technological lineage (what defines a technological line or 
continuum, 
and its variable extension, from a given standpoint?).

 

It would be useless to say that metallurgy is a science because it discovers 

constant laws, for example, the melting point of a metal at all times and in 

all places. For metallurgy is inseparable from several lines of variation: var-

iation between meteorites and indigenous metals; variation between ores 

and proportions of metal; variation between alloys, natural and artificial; 

variation between the operations performed upon a metal; variation 

between the qualities that make a given operation possible, or that result 

from a given operation (for example, twelve varieties of copper identified 

and inventoried at Sumer by place of origin and degree of refinement).

89 

All of these variables can be grouped under two overall rubrics: singulari-
ties or spatiotemporal haecceities 
of different orders, and the operations 

associated with them as processes of deformation or transformation; 
affective qualities or traits ofexpression of different levels, corresponding to

 

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these singularities and operations (hardness, weight, color, etc.). Let us 

return to the example of the saber, or rather of crucible steel. It implies the 

actualization of a first singularity, namely, the melting of the iron at high 

temperature; then a second singularity, the successive decarbonations; cor-

responding to these singularities are traits of expression—not only the 

hardness, sharpness, and finish, but also the undulations or designs traced 

by the crystallization and resulting from the internal structure of the cast 

steel. The iron sword is associated with entirely different singularities 

because it is forged and not cast or molded, quenched and not air cooled, 

produced by the piece and not in number; its traits of expression are neces-

sarily very different because it pierces rather than hews, attacks from the 

front rather than from the side; even the expressive designs are obtained in 

an entirely different way, by inlay.

90

 We may speak of a machinic phylum, or 

technological lineage, wherever we find a constellation of singularities, 
prolongable by certain operations, which converge, and make the operations 
converge, upon one or several assignable traits of expression. 
If the singulari-

ties or operations diverge, in different materials or in the same material, we 

must distinguish two different phyla: this is precisely the case for the iron 

sword, descended from the dagger, and the steel saber, descended from the 

knife. Each phylum has its own singularities and operations, its own quali-

ties and traits, which determine the relation of desire to the technical ele-

ment (the affects the saber "has" are not the same as those of the sword). 

But it is always possible to situate the analysis on the level of singularities 

that are prolongable from one phylum to another, and to tie the two phyla 

together. At the limit, there is a single phylogenetic lineage, a single 

machinic phylum, ideally continuous: the flow of matter-movement, the 

flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying singularities and traits 

of expression. This operative and expressive flow is as much artificial as 

natural: it is like the unity of human beings and Nature. But at the same 

time, it is not realized in the here and now without dividing, differentiat-

ing. We will call an assemblage every constellation of singularities and 

traits deducted from the flow—selected, organized, stratified—in such a 

way as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage, 

in this sense, is a veritable invention. Assemblages may group themselves 

into extremely vast constellations constituting "cultures," or even "ages"; 

within these constellations, the assemblages still differentiate the phyla or 

the flow, dividing it into so many different phylas, of a given order, on a 

given level, and introducing selective discontinuities in the ideal continu-

ity of matter-movement. The assemblages cut the phylum up into distinct, 

differentiated lineages, at the same time as the machinic phylum cuts 

across them all, taking leave of one to pick up again in another, or making 

them coexist. A certain singularity embedded in the flanks of the phylum,

 

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for example, the chemistry of carbon, will be brought up to the surface by a 

given assemblage that selects, organizes, invents it, and through which all 

or part of the phylum passes, at a given place at a given time. We may distin-

guish in every case a number of very different lines. Some of them, 

phylogenetic lines, travel long distances between assemblages of various ages 

and cultures (from the blowgun to the cannon? from the prayer wheel to 

the propeller? from the pot to the motor?); others, ontogenetic lines, are 

internal to one assemblage and link up its various elements or else cause 

one element to pass, often after a delay, into another assemblage of a differ-

ent nature but of the same culture or age (for example, the horseshoe, which 

spread through agricultural assemblages). It is thus necessary to take into 

account the selective action of the assemblages upon the phylum, and the 

evolutionary reaction of the phylum as the subterranean thread that passes 

from one assemblage to another, or quits an assemblage, draws it forward 

and opens it up. Vital impulse! Leroi-Gourhan has gone the farthest 

toward a technological vitalism taking biological evolution in general as 

the model for technical evolution: a Universal Tendency, laden with all of 

the singularities and traits of expression, traverses technical and interior 

milieus that refract or differentiate it in accordance with the singularities 

and traits each of them retains, selects, draws together, causes to converge, 

invents.

91

 There is indeed a machinic phylum in variation that creates the 

technical assemblages, whereas the assemblages invent the various phyla. 

A technological lineage changes significantly according to whether one 

draws it upon the phylum or inscribes it in the assemblages; but the two are 

inseparable.

 

So how are we to define this matter-movement, this matter-energy, this 

matter-flow, this matter in variation that enters assemblages and leaves 

them? It is a destratified, deterritorialized matter. It seems to us that 

Husserl brought thought a decisive step forward when he discovered a 

region of vague and material essences (in other words, essences that are 

vagabond, anexact and yet rigorous), distinguishing them from fixed, 

metric and formal, essences. We have seen that these vague essences are as 

distinct from formed things as they are from formal essences. They con-

stitute fuzzy aggregates. They relate to a corporeality (materiality) that is 

not to be confused either with an intelligible, formal essentiality or a sen-

sible, formed and perceived, thinghood. This corporeality has two char-

acteristics: on the one hand, it is inseparable from passages to the limit as 

changes of state, from processes of deformation or transformation that oper-

ate in a space-time itself anexact and that act in the manner of events 

(ablation, adjunction, projection . . .); on the other hand, it is inseparable 

from expressive or intensive qualities, which can be higher or lower in 

degree, and are produced in the manner of variable affects (resistance,

 

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hardness, weight, color . . .)• There is thus an ambulant coupling, 
events-affects, which constitutes the vague corporeal essence and is distinct 

from the sedentary linkage, "fixed essence-properties of the thing 

deriving from the essence," "formal essence-formed thing." Doubtless 

Husserl had a tendency to make the vague essence a kind of intermediary 

between the essence and the sensible, between the thing and the concept, a 

little like the Kantian schema. Is not roundness a schematic or vague essence, 

intermediary between rounded sensible things and the conceptual essence of 

the circle? In effect, roundness exists only as a threshold-affect (neither flat 

nor pointed) and as a limit-process (becoming rounded), through sensible 

things and technical agents, millstone, lathe, wheel, spinning wheel socket, 

etc. But it is only "intermediary" to the extent that what is intermediary is 

autonomous, initially stretching itself  between things, and between 

thoughts, to establish a whole new relation between thoughts and things, a 
vague identity between the two.

 

Certain distinctions proposed by Simondon can be compared to those 

of Husserl. For Simondon exposes the technological insufficiency of the 

matter-form model, in that it assumes a fixed form and a matter deemed 

homogeneous. It is the idea of the law that assures the model's coherence, 

since laws are what submit matter to this or that form, and conversely, 

realize in matter a given property deduced from the form. But Simondon 

demonstrates that the hylomorphic model leaves many things, active and 

affective, by the wayside. On the one hand, to the formed or formable mat-

ter we must add an entire energetic materiality in movement, carrying sin-
gularities  
or  haecceities  that are already like implicit forms that are 

topological, rather than geometrical, and that combine with processes of 

deformation: for example, the variable undulations and torsions of the 

fibers guiding the operation of splitting wood. On the other hand, to the 

essential properties of the matter deriving from the formal essence we must 

add variable intensive affects, now resulting from the operation, now on the 

contrary making it possible: for example, wood that is more or less porous, 

more or less elastic and resistant. At any rate, it is a question of surrender-

ing to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a 

materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter: what one addresses 

is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos. 

One addresses less a form capable of imposing properties upon a matter 

than material traits of expression constituting affects. Of course, it is 

always possible to " translate" into a model that which escapes the model; 

thus, one may link the materiality's power of variation to laws adapting a 

fixed form and a constant matter to one another. But this cannot be done 

without a distortion that consists in uprooting variables form the state of 

continuous variation, in order to extract from them fixed points and con-

 

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stant relations. Thus one throws the variables off, even changing the nature 

of the equations, which cease to be immanent to matter-movement 

(inequations, adequations). The question is not whether such a translation 

is conceptually legitimate—it is—but what intuition gets lost in it. In 

short, what Simondon criticizes the hylomorphic model for is taking form 

and matter to be two terms defined separately, like the ends of two 

half-chains whose connection can no longer be seen, like a simple 

relation of molding behind which there is a perpetually variable, 

continuous modulation that it is no longer possible to grasp.

92

 The critique of 

the hylomorphic schema is based on "the existence, between form and 

matter, of a zone of medium and intermediary dimension," of energetic, 

molecular dimension—a space unto itself that deploys its materiality 

through matter, a number unto itself that propels its traits through form.

 

We always get back to this definition: the machinic phylum is ma-

teriality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in 

movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and 

traits of expression. This has obvious consequences: namely, this 

matter-flow can only he followed. Doubtless, the operation that consists in 

following can be carried out in one place: an artisan who planes follows the 

wood, the fibers of the wood, without changing location. But this way of 

following is only one particular sequence in a more general process. For 

artisans are obliged to follow in another way as well, in other words, to go 

find the wood where it lies, and to find the wood with the right kind of 

fibers. Otherwise, they must have it brought to them: it is only because 

merchants take care of one segment of the journey in reverse that the 

artisans can avoid making the trip themselves. But artisans are complete 

only if they are also prospectors; and the organization that separates 

prospectors, merchants, and artisans already mutilates artisans in order to 

make "workers" of them. We will therefore define the artisan as one who 

is determined in such a way as to follow a flow of matter, a machinic 
phylum.  
The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. To follow the flow of 

matter is to itinerate, to ambulate. It is intuition in action. Of course, there 

are second-order itinerancies where it is no longer a flow of matter that one 

prospects and follows, but, for example, a market. Nevertheless, it is 

always a flow that is followed, even if the flow is not always that of 

matter. And, above all, there are secondary itinerancies, which derive 

from another "condition," even if they are necessarily entailed by it. For 

example, a transhumant,  whether a farmer or an animal raiser, changes 

land after it is worn out, or else seasonally; but transhumants only 

secondarily follow a land flow, because they undertake a rotation meant 

from the start to return them to the point from which they left, after the 

forest has regenerated, the land has rested, the weather has changed. 

Transhumants do not follow a flow, they draw a circuit; they only

 

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follow the part of the flow that enters into the circuit, even an ever-wid-

ening one. Transhumants are therefore itinerant only consequentially, or 

become itinerant only when their circuit of land or pasture has been 

exhausted, or when the rotation has become so wide that the flows escape 

the circuit. Even the merchant is a transhumant, to the extent that mercan-

tile flows are subordinated to the rotation between a point of departure and 

a point of arrival (go get-bring back, import-export, buy-sell). Whatever 

the reciprocal implications, there are considerable differences between a 

flow and a circuit. The migrant, we have seen, is something else again. And 

the nomad is not primarily defined as an itinerant or as a transhumant, nor 

as a migrant, even though nomads become these consequentially. The pri-

mary determination of nomads is to occupy and hold a smooth space: it is 

this aspect that determines them as nomad (essence). On their own 

account, they will be transhumants, or itinerants, only by virtue of the 

imperatives imposed by the smooth spaces. In short, whatever the de facto 

mixes between nomadism, itinerancy, and transhumance, the primary 

concept is different in the three cases (smooth space, matter-flow, rota-

tion). It is only on the basis of the distinct concept that we can make a judg-

ment on the mix—on when it is produced, on the form in which it is 

produced, and on the order in which it is produced.

 

But in the course of the preceding discussion, we have wandered from 

the question: Why is the machinic phylum, the flow of matter, essentially 

metallic or metallurgical? Here again, it is only the distinct concept that 

can give us an answer, in that it shows that there is a special, primary rela-

tion between itinerance and metallurgy (deterritorialization). However, 

the examples we took from Husserl and Simondon concerned wood and 

clay as well as metals. Besides, are there not flows of grass, water, herds, 

which form so many phyla or matters in movement? It is easier for us to 

answer these questions now. For it is as if metal and metallurgy imposed 

upon and raised to consciousness something that is only hidden or buried 

in the other matters and operations. The difference is that elsewhere the 

operations occur between two thresholds, one of which constitutes the 

matter prepared for the operation, and the other the form to be incarnated 

(for example, the clay and the mold). The hylomorphic model derives its 

general value from this, since the incarnated form that marks the end of an 

operation can serve as the matter for a new operation, but in a fixed order 

marking a succession of thresholds. In metallurgy, on the other hand, the 

operations are always astride the thresholds, so that an energetic 

materiality overspills the prepared matter, and a qualitative deformation 

or transformation overspills the form.

93

 For example, quenching follows 

forging and takes place after the form has been fixed. Or, to take another 

example, in molding, the metallurgist in a sense works inside the mold. Or

 

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again, steel that is melted and molded later undergoes a series of successive 

decarbonations. Finally, metallurgy has the option of melting down and 

reusing a matter to which it gives an ingot-form: the history of metal is 

inseparable from this very particular form, which is not to be confused 

with either a stock or a commodity; monetary value derives from it. More 

generally, the metallurgical idea of the "reducer" expresses this double lib-

eration of a materiality in relation to a prepared matter, and of a transfor-

mation in relation to the form to be incarnated. Matter and form have 

never seemed more rigid than in metallurgy; yet the succession of forms 

tends to be replaced by the form of a continuous development, and the var-

iability of matters tends to be replaced by the matter of a continuous varia-

tion. If metallurgy has an essential relation with music, it is by virtue not 

only of the sounds of the forge but also of the tendency within both arts to 

bring into its own, beyond separate forms, a continuous development of 

form, and beyond variable matters, a continuous variation of matter: a 

widened chromaticism sustains both music and metallurgy; the musical 

smith was the first "transformer."

94

 In short, what metal and metallurgy 

bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a mate-

rial vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or 

covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model. 

Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal 

the correlate of this consciousness. As expressed in panmetallism, metal is 

coextensive to the whole of matter, and the whole of matter to metallurgy. 

Even the waters, the grasses and varieties of wood, the animals are popu-

lated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is 

everywhere. Metal is the conductor of all matter. The machinic phylum is 

metallurgical, or at least has a metallic head, as its itinerant probe-head or 

guidance device. And thought is born more from metal than from stone: 

metallurgy is minor science in person, "vague" science or the phenom-

enology of matter. The prodigious idea of Nonorganic Life—the very same 

idea Worringer considered the barbarian idea par excellence

95

—was the 

invention, the intuition of metallurgy. Metal is neither a thing nor an 

organism, but a body without organs. The "Northern, or Gothic, line" is 

above all a mining or metallic line delimiting this body. The relation 

between metallurgy and alchemy reposes not, as Jung believed, on the sym-

bolic value of metal and its correspondence with an organic soul but on the 

immanent power of corporeality in all matter, and on the esprit de corps 

accompanying it.

 

The first and primary itinerant is the artisan. But artisans are neither 

hunters, farmers, nor animal raisers. Neither are they winnowers or pot-

ters, who only secondarily take up craft activity. Rather, artisans are those 

who follow the matter-flow as pure productivity: therefore in mineral

 

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form, and not in vegetable or animal form. They are not of the land, or of 

the soil, but of the subsoil. Because metal is the pure productivity of matter, 

those who follow metal are producers of objects par excellence. As demon-

strated by V. Gordon Childe, the metallurgist is the first specialized arti-

san, and in this respect forms a collective body  (secret societies, guilds, 

journeymen's associations). Artisans-metallurgists are itinerants because 

they follow the matter-flow of the subsoil. Of course metallurgists have 

relations with "the others," those of the soil, land, and sky. They have rela-

tions with the farmers of the sedentary communities, and with the celestial 

functionaries of the empire who overcode those communities; in fact, they 

need them to survive, they depend on an imperial agricultural stockpile for 

their very sustenance.

96

 But in their work, they have relations with the forest 

dwellers, and partially depend on them: they must establish their workshops 

near the forest in order to obtain the necessary charcoal. In their space, 

they have relations with the nomads, since the subsoil unites the ground 
(sol) of smooth space and the land of striated space: there are no mines in 

the alluvial valleys of the empire-dominated farmers; it is necessary to 

cross deserts, approach the mountains; and the question of control over 

the mines always involves nomadic peoples. Every mine is a line of flight 

that is in communication with smooth spaces—there are parallels today in 

the problems with oil.

 

Archaeology and history remain strangely silent on this question of the 

control over the mines. There have been empires with a strong metallurgi-

cal organization that had no mines; the Near East lacked tin, so necessary 

for the fabrication of bronze. Large quantities of metal arrived in ingot 

form, and from very far away (for instance, tin from Spain or even from 

Cornwall). So complex a situation implies not only a strong imperial 

bureaucracy and elaborate long-distance commercial circuits; it also 

implies a shifting politics, in which States confront an outside, in which 

very different peoples confront one another, or else reach some accommo-

dation on particular aspects of the control of mines (extraction, charcoal, 

workshops, transportation). It is not enough to say that there are wars and 

mining expeditions; or to invoke "a Eurasian synthesis of the nomadic 

workshops from the approaches of China to the tip of Britanny," and 

remark that "the nomadic populations had been in contact with the princi-

pal metallurgical centers of the ancient world since prehistoric times."

97 

What is needed is a better knowledge of the nomads' relations with these 

centers, with the smiths they themselves employed or frequented, with 

properly metallurgical peoples or groups who were their neighbors. What 

was the situation in the Caucasus and in the Altai? In Spain and North 

Africa? Mines are a source of flow, mixture, and escape with few equiva-

lents in history. Even when they are well controlled by an empire that owns

 

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them (as in the Chinese and Roman empires), there is a major movement of 
clandestine exploitation, and of miners' alliances either with nomad and 
barbarian incursions or peasant revolts. The study of myths, and even eth-
nographic considerations on the status of smiths, divert us from these 
political questions. Mythology and ethnology do not have the right method 
in this regard. It is too often asked how the others "react" to the smith, and 
as a result, one succumbs to the usual platitudes about the ambivalence of 
feelings;  it is said that the smith is simultaneously honored, feared, and 
scorned—more or less scorned among the nomads, more or less honored 
among the sedentaries.

98

 But this loses sight of the reasons for this situa-

tion, of the specificity of the smiths themselves, of the nonsymmetrical 
relation they entertain with the nomads and the sedentaries, the type of 
affects they invent (metallic affect). Before looking at the feelings of others 
toward smiths, it is necessary to evaluate the smiths themselves as Other; 
as such, they have different affective relations with the sedentaries and the 
nomads.

 

There are no nomadic or sedentary smiths. Smiths are ambulant, itiner-

ant. Particularly important in this respect is the way in which smiths live: 
their space is neither the striated space of the sedentary nor the smooth 
space of the nomad. Smiths may have a tent, they may have a house; they 
inhabit them in the manner of an "ore bed" (gite, shelter, home, mineral 
deposit), like metal itself, in the manner of a cave or a hole, a hut half or all 
underground. They are cave dwellers not by nature but by artistry and 
need." A splendid text by Elie Faure evokes the infernal progress of the 
itinerant peoples of India as they bore holes in space and create the fantas-
tic forms corresponding to these breakthroughs, the vital forms of 
nonorganic life: "There at the shore of the sea, at the base of a mountain, 
they encountered a great wall of granite. Then they all entered the granite; 
in its shadows they lived, loved, worked, died, were born, and, three or four 
centuries afterward, they came out again, leagues away, having traversed 
the mountain. Behind them they left the emptied rock, its galleries hol-
lowed out in every direction, its sculptured, chiseled walls, its natural or 
artificial pillars turned into a deep lacework with ten thousand horrible or 
charming figures.. . . Here man confesses unresistingly his strength and his 
nothingness. He does not exact the affirmation of a determined ideal from 
form.... He extracts it rough from formlessness, according to the dictates 
of the formless. He utilizes the indentations and accidents of the rock."

100 

Metallurgical India. Transpierce the mountains instead of scaling them, 
excavate the land instead of striating it, bore holes in space instead of keep-
ing it smooth, turn the earth into swiss cheese. An image from the film 
Strike [by Eisenstein] presents a holey space where a disturbing group of

 

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Holey Space

 

people are rising, each emerging from his or her hole as if from a field 

mined in all directions. The sign of Cain is the corporeal and affective sign 

of the subsoil, passing through both the striated land of sedentary space 

and the nomadic ground {sot) of smooth space without stopping at either 

one, the vagabond sign of itinerancy, the double theft and double betrayal 

of the metallurgist, who shuns agriculture at the same time as animal rais-

ing. Must we reserve the name Cainite for these metallurgical peoples who 

haunt the depths of History? Prehistoric Europe was crisscrossed by the 
battle-ax people, who came in off the steppes like a detached metallic 

branch of the nomads, and the people known for their bell-shaped pottery, 

the  beaker people, originating in Andalusia, a detached branch of 

mega-lithic agriculture.

101

 Strange peoples, dolicocephalics and 

brachycephalics who mix and spread across all of Europe. Are they the ones 

who kept up the mines, boring holes in European space from every 

direction, constituting our European space?

 

Smiths are not nomadic among the nomads and sedentary among the 

sedentaries, nor half-nomadic among the nomads, half-sedentary among 

sedentaries. Their relation to others results from their internal itinerancy,

 

 

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from their vague essence, and not the reverse. It is in their specificity, it is 

by virtue of their itinerancy, by virtue of their inventing a holey space, that 

they necessarily communicate with the sedentaries and with the nomads 

(and with others besides, with the transhumant forest dwellers). They are 

in themselves double: a hybrid, an alloy, a twin formation. As Griaule says, 

Dogon smiths are not "impure" but "mixed," and it is because they are 

mixed that they are endogamous,  that they do not intermarry with the 

pure, who have a simplified progeny while they reconstitute a twin prog-

eny.

102

 Childe demonstrates that metallurgists are necessarily doubled, 

that they exist two times, once as captured by and maintained within the 

apparatus of the oriental empire, again in the Aegean world, where they 

were much more mobile and much freer. But the two segments cannot be 
separated, 
simply by relating each of them to their particular context. The 

metallurgist belonging to an empire, the worker, presupposes a metallur-

gist-prospector, however far away; and the prospector ties in with a mer-

chant, who brings the metal to the first metallurgist. In addition, the metal 

is worked on by each segment, and the ingot-form is common to them all: 

we must imagine less separate segments than a chain of mobile workshops 

constituting, from hole to hole, a line of variation, a gallery. Thus the met-

allurgists' relation to the nomads and the sedentaries also passes through 

the relations they have with other metallurgists.

103

 This hybrid metallur-

gist, a weapon- and toolmaker, communicates with the sedentaries and 

with the nomads at the same time. Holey space itself communicates with 

smooth space and striated space. In effect, the machinic phylum or the 

metallic line passes through all of the assemblages: nothing is more 

deterritorialized than matter-movement. But it is not at all in the same 

way, and the two communications are not symmetrical. Worringer, in the 

domain of aesthetics, said that the abstract line took on two quite different 

expressions, one in barbarian Gothic art, the other in the organic classical 

art. Here, we would say that the phylum simultaneously has two different 

modes of liaison: it is always connected to nomad space, whereas it conju-
gates 
with sedentary space. On the side of the nomadic assemblages and 

war machines, it is a kind of rhizome, with its gaps, detours, subterranean 

passages, stems, openings, traits, holes, etc. On the other side, the seden-

tary assemblages and State apparatuses effect a capture of the phylum, put 

the traits of expression into a form or a code, make the holes resonate 

together, plug the lines of flight, subordinate the technological operation to 

the work model, impose upon the connections a whole regime of arbor-

escent conjunctions.

 

A

XIOM 

III. The nomad war machine is the form of expression, of which 

itinerant metallurgy is the correlative form of content.

 

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Content

 

Expression

 

Substance

 

Holey space

 

(machinic phylum

 

or matter-flow)

 

Smooth space

 

Form

 

Itinerant 

metallurgy

 

Nomad war 

machine

 

P

ROPOSITION 

IX. War does not necessarily have the battle as its object, 

and more important, the war machine does not necessarily have war as 
its object, although war and the battle may be its necessary result 
(under certain conditions).

 

We now come to three successive problems. First, is the battle the 

"object" of war? But also, is war the "object" of the war machine? And 

finally, to what extent is the war machine the "object" of the State appara-

tus? The ambiguity of the first two problems is certainly due to the term 

"object," but implies their dependency on the third. We must nevertheless 

approach these problems gradually, even if we are reduced to multiplying 

examples. The first question, that of the battle, requires an immediate dis-

tinction to be made between two cases: when a battle is sought, and when it 

is essentially avoided by the war machine. These two cases in no way coin-

cide with the offensive and the defensive. But war in the strict sense 

(according to a conception of it that culminated in Foch) does seem to have 

the battle as its object, whereas guerrilla warfare explicitly aims for the 
nonbattle. However, the development of war into the war of movement, 

and into total war, also places the notion of the battle in question, as much 

from the offensive as the defensive points of view: the concept of the 

nonbattle seems capable of expressing the speed of a flash attack, and the 

counterspeed of an immediate response.

104

 Conversely, the development 

of guerilla warfare implies a moment when, and forms under which, a bat-

tle must be effectively sought, in connection with exterior and interior 

"support points." And it is true that guerrilla warfare and war proper are 

constantly borrowing each other's methods and that the borrowings run 

equally in both directions (for example, stress has often been laid on the 

inspirations land-based guerrilla warfare received from maritime war). All 

we can say is that the battle and the nonbattle are the double object of war, 

according to a criterion that does not coincide with the offensive and the 

defensive, or even with war proper and guerrilla warfare.

 

That is why we push the question further back, asking if war itself is the

 

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object of the war machine. It is not at all obvious. To the extent that war 

(with or without the battle) aims for the annihilation or capitulation of 

enemy forces, the war machine does not necessarily have war as its object 

(for example, the raid can be seen as another object, rather than as a partic-

ular form of war). But more generally, we have seen that the war machine 

was the invention of the nomad, because it is in its essence the constitutive 

element of smooth space, the occupation of this space, displacement 

within this space, and the corresponding composition of people: this is its 

sole and veritable positive object (nomos).  Make the desert, the steppe, 

grow; do not depopulate it, quite the contrary. If war necessarily results, it 

is because the war machine collides with States and cities, as forces (of 

stri-ation) opposing its positive object: from then on, the war machine has as 

its enemy the State, the city, the state and urban phenomenon, and adopts 

as its objective their annihilation. It is at this point that the war machine 

becomes war: annihilate the forces of the State, destroy the State-form. The 

Attila, or Genghis Khan, adventure clearly illustrates this progression 

from the positive object to the negative object. Speaking like Aristotle, we 

would say that war is neither the condition nor the object of the war 

machine, but necessarily accompanies or completes it; speaking like 

Derrida, we would say that war is the "supplement" of the war machine. It 

may even happen that this supplementarity is comprehended through a 

progressive, anxiety-ridden revelation. Such, for example, was the adven-

ture of Moses: leaving the Egyptian State behind, launching into the desert, 

he begins by forming a war machine, on the inspiration of the old past of 

the nomadic Hebrews and on the advice of his father-in-law, who came 

from the nomads. This is the machine of the Just, already a war machine, 

but one that does not yet have war as its object. Moses realizes, little by lit-

tle, in stages, that war is the necessary supplement of that machine, because 

it encounters or must cross cities and States, because it must send ahead 

spies (armed observation), then perhaps take things to extremes (war of 
annihilation). 
Then the Jewish people experience doubt, and fear that they 

are not strong enough; but Moses also doubts, he shrinks before the revela-

tion of this supplement. And it will be Joshua, not Moses, who is charged 

with waging war. Finally, speaking like Kant, we would say that the relation 

between war and the war machine is necessary but "synthetic" (Yahweh is 

necessary for the synthesis).

 

The question of war, in turn, is pushed further back and is subordinated 

to the relations between the war machine and the State apparatus. States 

were not the first to make war: war, of course, is not a phenomenon one 

finds in the universality of Nature, as nonspecific violence. But war is not 

the object of States, quite the contrary. The most archaic States do not even 

seem to have had a war machine, and their domination, as we will see, was

 

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based on other agencies (comprising, rather, the police and prisons). It is 

safe to assume that the intervention of an extrinsic or nomad war machine 

that counterattacked and destroyed the archaic but powerful States was 

one of the mysterious reasons for their sudden annihilation. But the State 

learns fast. One of the biggest questions from the point of view of universal 

history is: How will the State appropriate the war machine, that is, consti-

tute one for itself, in conformity with its size, its domination, and its aims? 

And with what risks? (What we call a military institution, or army, is not at 

all the war machine in itself, but the form under which it is appropriated by 

the State.) In order to grasp the paradoxical character of such an undertak-

ing, we must recapitulate the hypothesis in its entirety. (1) The war 

machine is that nomad invention that in fact has war not as its primary 

object but as its second-order, supplementary or synthetic objective, in the 

sense that it is determined in such a way as to destroy the State-form and 

city-form with which it collides. (2) When the State appropriates the war 

machine, the latter obviously changes in nature and function, since it is 

afterward directed against the nomad and all State destroyers, or else 

expresses relations between States, to the extent that a State undertakes 

exclusively to destroy another State or impose its aims upon it. (3) It is pre-

cisely after the war machine has been appropriated by the State in this way 

that it tends to take war for its direct and primary object, for its "analytic" 

object (and that war tends to take the battle for its object). In short, it is at 

one and the same time that the State apparatus appropriates a war 

machine, that the war machine takes war as its object, and that war be-

comes subordinated to the aims of the State.

 

This question of appropriation is so varied historically that it is neces-

sary to distinguish between several kinds of problems. The first concerns 

the possibility of the operation: it is precisely because war is only the sup-

plementary or synthetic object of the nomad war machine that it experi-

ences the hesitation that proves fatal to it, and that the State apparatus for 

its part is able to lay hold of war and thus turn the war machine back against 

the nomads. The hesitation of the nomad is legendary: What is to be done 

with the lands conquered and crossed? Return them to the desert, to the 

steppe, to open pastureland? Or let a State apparatus survive that is capa-

ble of exploiting them directly, at the risk of becoming, sooner or later, sim-

ply a new dynasty of that apparatus: sooner or later because Genghis Khan 

and his followers were able to hold out for a long time by partially integrat-

ing themselves into the conquered empires, while at the same time main-

taining a smooth space on the steppes to which the imperial centers were 

subordinated. That was their genius, the Pax Mongolica. It remains the 

case that the integration of the nomads into the conquered empires was one 

of the most powerful factors of appropriation of the war machine by the

 

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State apparatus: the inevitable danger to which the nomads succumbed. 

But there is another danger as well, the one threatening the State when it 

appropriates the war machine (all States have felt the weight of this danger, 

as well as the risks this appropriation represents for them). Tamerlane is 

the extreme example. He was not Genghis Khan's successor but his exact 

opposite: it was Tamerlane who constructed a fantastic war machine 

turned back against the nomads, but who, by that very fact, was obliged to 

erect a State apparatus all the heavier and more unproductive since it 

existed only as the empty form of appropriation of that machine.

105

 Turn-

ing the war machine back against the nomads may constitute for the State a 

danger as great as that presented by nomads directing the war machine 

against States.

 

A second type of problem concerns the concrete forms the appropria-

tion of the war machine takes: Mercenary or territorial? A professional 

army or a conscripted army? A special body or national recruiting? Not 

only are these formulas not equivalent, but there are all the possible mixes 

between them. Perhaps the most relevant distinction to make, or the most 

general one, would be: Is there merely "encastment" of the war machine, 

or "appropriation" proper? The capture of the war machine by the State 

apparatus took place following two paths, by encasting a society of warri-

ors (who arrived from without or arose from within), or on the contrary 

by constituting it in accordance with rules corresponding to civil society 

as a whole. Once again, there is passage and transition from one formula 

to another. Last, the third type of problem concerns the means of appro-

priation. We must consider from this standpoint the various data pertain-

ing to the fundamental aspects of the State apparatus: territoriality, work 
or public works, taxation. 
The constitution of a military institution or an 

army necessarily implies a territorialization of the war machine, in other 

words, the granting of land ("colonial" or domestic), which can take very 

diverse forms. But at the same time, fiscal regimes determine both the 

nature of the services and taxes owed by the beneficiary warriors, and 

especially the kind of civil tax to which all or part of society is subject for 

the maintenance of the army. And the State enterprise of public works 

must be reorganized along the lines of a "laying out of the territory" in 

which the army plays a determining role, not only in the case of fortresses 

and fortified cities, but also in strategic communication, the logistical 

structure, the industrial infrastructure, etc. (the role and function of the 

Engineer in this form of appropriation).

106

 

Let us compare this hypothesis as a whole with Clausewitz's formula: 

"War is the continuation of politics by other means." As we know, this for-

mula is itself extracted from a theoretical and practical, historic and 

transhistoric, aggregate whose parts are interconnected. (1) There is a pure

 

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concept of war as absolute, unconditioned war, an Idea not given in experi-

ence (bring down or "upset" the enemy, who is assumed to have no other 

determination, with no political, economic, or social considerations 

entering in). (2) What is given are real wars as submitted to State aims; 

States are better or worse "conductors" in relation to absolute war, and in 

any case condition its realization in experience. (3) Real wars swing 

between two poles, both subject to State politics: the war of annihilation, 

which can escalate to total war (depending on the objectives of the annihi-

lation) and tends to approach the unconditioned concept via an ascent to 

extremes; and limited war, which is no "less" a war, but one that effects a 

descent toward limiting conditions, and can de-escalate to mere "armed 

observation."

107

 

In the first place, the distinction between absolute war as Idea and real 

wars seems to us to be of great importance, but only if a different criterion 

than that of Clausewitz is applied. The pure Idea is not that of the abstract 

elimination of the adversary but that of a war machine that does not have 
war as its object 
and that only entertains a potential or supplementary syn-

thetic relation with war. Thus the nomad war machine does not appear to 

us to be one case of real war among others, as in Clausewitz, but on the con-

trary the content adequate to the Idea, the invention of the Idea, with its 

own objects, space, and composition of the nomos. Nevertheless it is still 

an Idea, and it is necessary to retain the concept of the pure Idea, even 

though this war machine was realized by the nomads. It is the nomads, 

rather, who remain an abstraction, an Idea, something real and nonactual, 

and for several reasons: first, because the elements of nomadism, as we 

have seen, enter into de facto mixes with elements of migration, itinerancy, 

and transhumance; this does not affect the purity of the concept, but intro-

duces always mixed objects, or combinations of space and composition, 

which react back upon the war machine from the beginning. Second, even 

in the purity of its concept, the nomad war machine necessarily effectuates 

its synthetic relation with war as supplement, uncovered and developed in 

opposition to the State-form, the destruction of which is at issue. But that is 

exactly it; it does not effectuate this supplementary object or this synthetic 

relation without the State, for its part, finding the opportunity to appropri-

ate the war machine, and the means of making war the direct object of this 

turned-around machine (thus the integration of the nomad into the State is 

a vector traversing nomadism from the very beginning, from the first act of 

war against the State).

 

The question is therefore less the realization of war than the appropria-

tion of the war machine. It is at the same time that the State apparatus 
appropriates the war machine, subordinates it to its "political" aims, and 

gives it war as its direct object. And it is one and the same historical ten-

 

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dency that causes State to evolve from a triple point of view: going from fig-

ures of encastment to forms of appropriation proper, going from limited 

war to so-called total war, and transforming the relation between aim and 

object. The factors that make State war total war are closely connected to 

capitalism: it has to do with the investment of constant capital in equip-

ment, industry, and the war economy, and the investment of variable capi-

tal in the population in its physical and mental aspects (both as warmaker 

and as victim of war).

108

 Total war is not only a war of annihilation but 

arises when annihilation takes as its "center" not only the enemy army, or 

the enemy State, but the entire population and its economy. The fact that 

this double investment can be made only under prior conditions of limited 

war illustrates the irresistible character of the capitalist tendency to 

develop total war.'

09

 It is therefore true that total war remains subordinated 

to State political aims and merely realizes the maximal conditions of the 

appropriation of the war machine by the State apparatus. But it is also true 

that when total war becomes the object of the appropriated war machine, 

then at this level in the set of all possible conditions, the object and the aim 

enter into new relations that can reach the point of contradiction. This 

explains Clausewitz's vacillation when he asserts at one point that total war 

remains a war conditioned by the political aim of States, and at another 

that it tends to effectuate the Idea of unconditioned war. In effect, the aim 

remains essentially political and determined as such by the State, but the 

object itself has become unlimited. We could say that the appropriation 

has changed direction, or rather that States tend to unleash, reconstitute, 

an immense war machine of which they are no longer anything more than 

the opposable or apposed parts. This worldwide war machine, which in a 

way "reissues" from the States, displays two successive figures: first, that of 

fascism, which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than 

itself; but fascism is only a rough sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure 

is that of a war machine that takes peace as its obj ect directly, as the peace of 

Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space that now 

claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war itself is surpassed, 

toward a form of peace more terrifying still. The war machine has taken 

charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are now no more than 

objects or means adapted to that machine. This is the point at which 

Clausewitz's formula is effectively reversed; to be entitled to say that poli-

tics is the continuation of war by other means, it is not enough to invert the 

order of the words as if they could be spoken in either direction; it is neces-

sary to follow the real movement at the conclusion of which the States, hav-

ing appropriated a war machine, and having adapted it to their aims, 

reimpart a war machine that takes charge of the aim, appropriates the 

States, and assumes increasingly wider political functions.

110

 

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Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We have 

watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction 

story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more terrifying 

than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible of 

local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of 

enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the "unspeci-

fied enemy"; we have seen it put its counterguerrilla elements into place, so 

that it can be caught by surprise once, but not twice. Yet the very conditions 

that make the State or World war machine possible, in other words, con-

stant capital (resources and equipment) and human variable capital, 

continually recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack, unfore-

seen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant 

machines. The definition of the Unspecified Enemy testifies to this: "mul-

tiform, maneuvering and omnipresent... of the moral, political, subversive 

or economic order, etc.," the unassignable material Saboteur or human 

Deserter assuming the most diverse forms."' The first theoretical element 

of importance is the fact that the war machine has many varied meanings, 

and this is precisely because the war machine has an extremely variable 
relation to war itself. 
The war machine is not uniformly defined, and 

comprises something other than increasing quantities of force. We have 

tried to define two poles of the war machine: at one pole, it takes war for its 

object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the 

universe. But in all of the shapes it assumes here—limited war, total war, 

worldwide organization—war represents not at all the supposed essence of 

the war machine but only, whatever the machine's power, either the set of 

conditions under which the States appropriate the machine, even going so 

far as to project it as the horizon of the world, or the dominant order of 

which the States themselves are now only parts. The other pole seemed to be 

the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower "quantities," 

has as its object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight, the com-

position of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space. At 

this other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its supple-

mentary or synthetic object, now directed against the State and against the 

worldwide axiomatic expressed by States.

 

We thought it possible to assign the invention of the war machine to the 

nomads. This was done only in the historical interest of demonstrating that 

the war machine as such was invented, even if it displayed from the begin-

ning all of the ambiguity that caused it to enter into composition with the 

other pole, and swing toward it from the start. However, in conformity with 

the essence, the nomads do not hold the secret: an "ideological," scientific, 

or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent 

to which it draws, in relation to aphylum, a plane of consistency, a creative

 

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line of flight, a smooth space of displacement. It is not the nomad who 

defines this constellation of characteristics; it is this constellation that 

defines the nomad, and at the same time the essence of the war machine. If 

guerrilla warfare, minority warfare, revolutionary and popular war are in 

conformity with the essence, it is because they take war as an object all the 

more necessary for being merely "supplementary": they can make war only 
on the condition that they simultaneously create something else, 
if only new 

nonorganic social relations. The difference between the two poles is great, 

even, and especially, from the point of view of death: the line of flight that 

creates, or turns into a line of destruction; the plane of consistency that 

constitutes itself, even piece by piece, or turns into a plan(e) of organiza-

tion and domination. We are constantly reminded that there is communi-

cation between these two lines or planes, that each takes nourishment from 

the other, borrows from the other: the worst of the world war machines 

reconstitutes a smooth space to surround and enclose the earth. But the 

earth asserts its own powers of deterritorialization, its lines of flight, its 

smooth spaces that live and blaze their way for a new earth. The question is 

not one of quantities but of the incommensurable character of the quanti-

ties that confront one another in the two kinds of war machine, according 

to the two poles. War machines take shape against the apparatuses that 

appropriate the machine and make war their affair and their object: they 

bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses 

of capture or domination.

 

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P

ROPOSITION 

X. The State and its poles.

 

Let us return to Dumezil's theses: (1) Political sovereignty has two poles, 
the fearsome magician-emperor, operating by capture, bonds, knots, and 
nets, and the jurist-priest-king, proceeding by treaties, pacts, contracts (the 
couples Varuna-Mitra, Odin-Tyr, Wotan-Tiwaz, Uranus-Zeus, 
Romulus-Numa . . .); (2) the war function is exterior to political 
sovereignty and is equally distinct from both its poles (Indra or Thor or 
Tullus Hostilius. . .).' 1. The State apparatus is thus animated by a curious 
rhythm, which is first of all a great mystery: that of the Binder-Gods or 
magic emperors, One-Eyed men emitting from their single eye signs that 
capture, tie knots at a distance. The jurist-kings, on the other hand, are 
One-Armed  men who raise their single arm as an element of right and 
technology, the law and the tool. In the succession of men of State, look 
always for the One-Eyed and the One-Armed, Horatius Codes and 
Mucius Scaevola (de Gaulle and

 

424

 

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Pompidou?). This is not to say that one has exclusive right to signs, the 

other to tools. The fearsome emperor is already the master of large-scale 

works; the wise king takes up and transforms the entire regime of signs. 

What it means is that the combination, signs-tools, constitutes the differ-

ential trait of political sovereignty, or the complementarity of the State.

2. Of course, the two men of State are always getting mixed up in affairs of 

war. But either the magic emperor sends to battle warriors who are not his 

own, whom he takes into his service by capture; or, more important, 

when he makes his appearance on the battlefield, he suspends the use of 

weapons, he throws his net over the warriors, his single eye throws them 

into petrified catatonia, "he binds without combat," he encasts  the war 

machine (this State capture is not to be confused with the captures of war: 

conquests, prisoners, spoils).

3

 As for the other pole, the jurist-king is a great 

organizer of war; but he gives it laws, lays out a field for it, makes it princi-

pled, imposes a discipline upon it, subordinates it to political ends. He 

turns the war machine into a military institution, he appropriates the war 

machine for the State apparatus.

4

 We should not be too hasty in speaking of 

a softening, a humanization: on the contrary, this is perhaps when the war 

machine has only one remaining object, that of war itself. Violence is found 

everywhere, but under different regimes and economies. The violence of 

the magic emperor: his knot, his net, his way of "making his moves once 

and for all" ... The violence of the jurist-king: his way of beginning over 

again every move, always with attention to ends, alliances, and laws... All 

things considered, the violence of the war machine might appear softer and 

more supple than that of the State apparatus because it does not yet have 

war as its "object," because it eludes both poles of the State. That is why the 

man of war, in his exteriority, is always protesting the alliances and pacts of 

the jurist-king, as well as severing the bonds of the magic emperor. He is 

equally an unbinder and a betrayer: twice the traitor.

5

 He has another econ-

omy, another cruelty, but also another justice, another pity. To the signs 

and tools of the State, the man of war opposes his weapons and jewelry. 

Once again, who could say which is better and which is worse? It is true that 

war kills, and hideously mutilates. But it is especially true after the State 

has appropriated the war machine. Above all, the State apparatus makes 

the mutilation, and even death, come first. It needs them 

preaccom-plished, for people to be born that way, crippled and zombielike. 

The myth of the zombie, of the living dead, is a work myth and not a war 

myth. Mutilation is a consequence of war, but it is a necessary condition, a 

presupposition of the State apparatus and the organization of work (hence 

the native infirmity not only of the worker but also of the man of State 

himself, whether of the One-Eyed or the One-Armed type): "The brutal 

exhibition of severed flesh shocked me.... Wasn't it an integral part of 

technical per-

 

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fection  and  the  intoxication  of  it. . .   ?  Mankind  has  waged  wars  since  the 

world began, but I can't remember one single example in the Iliad where 

the loss of an arm or a leg is reported. Mythology reserved mutilation for 

monsters, for human beasts of the race of Tantalus or Procrustes.... It is an 

optical illusion to attribute these mutilations to accidents. Actually, acci-

dents are the result of mutilations that took place long ago in the embryo of 

our world; and the increase in amputations is one of the symptoms bearing 

witness to the triumph of the morality of the scalpel. The loss occurred long 

before it was visibly taken into account."

6

 The State apparatus needs, at its 

summit as at its base, predisabled people, preexisting amputees, the still-

born, the congenitally infirm, the one-eyed and one-armed.

 

Thus there is a tempting three-part hypothesis: the war machine is 

"between" the two poles of political sovereignty and assures the passage 

from one pole to the other. It is indeed in that order, 1-2-3, that things seem 

to present themselves in myth and history. Take two versions of the 

One-Eyed and the One-Armed gods analyzed by Dumezil: (1) the god Odin, 

who has a single eye, ties up the wolf of war and holds him in his magic 

bond; (2) but the wolf is wary and has at its disposal all its power of 

exteriority; (3) the god Tyr gives the wolf a legal security by leaving one of 

his hands in the wolfs mouth so the wolf can bite it off if it does not 

succeed in extricating itself from the bond. (1) Horatius Codes, the 

One-Eyed, using only his face, his grimace and magic power, prevents 

the Etruscan commander from attacking Rome; (2) the war commander 

then decides to lay siege; (3) Mucius Scaevola takes a political tack, 

offering his hand as a security in order to  persuade the warrior that it 

would be best to abandon the siege and conclude a pact.

 

In an entirely different, historical, context, Marcel Detienne suggests an 

analogous schema in three moments for ancient Greece: (1) The magic sov-

ereign, the "Master of Truth," has at his disposal a war machine that doubt-

less does not originate with him, and which enjoys a relative autonomy 

within his empire; (2) this class of warriors has its own rules, defined by 

"isonomy," an isotropic space, and a "milieu" (war spoils are in the middle 
[au milieu], he who speaks places himself in the middle of the assembly); 

this is another space, the rules are different from those of the sovereign, 

who captures and speaks from on high; (3) the hoplite reform, the ground-

work for which was laid in the warrior class, spread throughout the social 

body, promoting the formation of an army of citizen-soldiers; at the same 

time, the last vestiges of the imperial pole of sovereignty were replaced by 

the juridical pole of the city-state (with isonomy as its law, and isotropy as 

its space).

7

 Thus in every case, the war machine seems to intervene 

"between" the two poles of the State apparatus, assuring and necessitating 

the passage from one to the other.

 

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We cannot, however, assign this schema a causal meaning (the authors 

cited do not do so). In the first place, the war machine explains nothing; for 

it is either exterior to the State, and directed against it; or else it already 

belongs to the State, encasted and appropriated, and presupposes it. If the 

war machine has a part in the evolution of the State, it is therefore necessar-

ily in conjunction with other internal factors. And this is the second point: 

if there is an evolution of the State, the second pole, the evolved pole, must 

be in resonance with the first, it must continually recharge it in some way, 

and the State must have only one milieu of interiority; in other words, it 

must have a unity of composition, in spite of all the differences in organiza-

tion and development among States. It is even necessary for each State to 

have both poles, as the essential moments of its existence, even though the 

organization of the two varies. Third, if we call this interior essence or this 

unity of the State "capture," we must say that the words "magic capture" 

describe the situation well because it always appears as preaccomplished 

and self-presupposing; but how is this capture to be explained then, if it 

leads back to no distinct assignable cause? That is why theses on the origin 

of the State are always tautological. At times, exogenous factors, tied to war 

and the war machine, are invoked; at times endogenous factors, thought to 

engender private property, money, etc.; and at times specific factors, 

thought to determine the formation of "public functions." All three of 

these theses are found in Engels, in relation to a conception of the diversity 

of the roads to Domination. But they beg the question. War produces the 

State only if at least one of the two parts is a preexistent State; and the 

organization of war is a State factor only if that organization is a part of the 

State. Either the State has no war machine (and has policemen and jailers 

before having soldiers), or else it has one, but in the form of a military insti-

tution or public function.

8

 Similarly, private property presupposes State 

public property, it slips through its net; and money presupposes taxation. It 

is even more difficult to see how public functions could have existed before 

the State they imply. We are always brought back to the idea of a State that 

comes into the world fully formed and rises up in a single stroke, the uncon-

ditioned Urstaat.

 

P

ROPOSITION 

XI. Which comes first?

 

We shall call the first pole of capture imperial or despotic. It corresponds 

to Marx's Asiatic formation. Archaeology discovers it everywhere, often 

lost in oblivion, at the horizon of all systems or States—not only in Asia, 

but also in Africa, America, Greece, Rome. Immemorial Urstaat, dating as 

far back as Neolithic times, and perhaps farther still. Following the Marxist 

description: a State apparatus is erected upon the primitive agricultural 

communities, which already have lineal-territorial codes; but it overcodes

 

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them,  submitting them to the power of a despotic emperor, the sole and 

transcendent public-property owner, the master of the surplus or the stock, 

the organizer of large-scale works (surplus labor), the source of public func-

tions and bureaucracy. This is the paradigm of the bond, the knot. Such is 

the regime of signs of the State: overcoding, or the Signifier. It is a system of 
machinic enslavement: the first "megamachine" in the strict sense, to use 

Mumford's term. A prodigious success in a single stroke; other States will 

be mere runts measured against this model. The emperor-despot is not a 

king or a tyrant; these will come into existence only as a function of private 

property once it has arisen.

9

 In the imperial regime, everything is public: 

ownership of land is communal, each individual is an owner only insofar as 

he or she is a member of the community; the eminent property of the des-

pot is that of the supposed Unity of the communities; and the functionaries 

themselves have land only if it comes with their position (although the 

position may be hereditary). Money may exist, notably in the form of the 

tax that the functionaries owe the emperor, but it is not used for 

buying-selling, since land does not exist as an alienable commodity. This 

is the regime of the nexum,  the bond: something is lent or even given 

without a transfer of ownership, without private appropriation, and the 

compensation for it does not come in the form of interest or profit for the 

donor but rather as a "rent" that accrues to him, accompanying the lending 

of something for another's use or the granting of revenue.

10

 

Marx, the historian, and Childe, the archaeologist, are in agreement on 

the following point: the archaic imperial State, which steps in to overcode 

agricultural communities, presupposes at least a certain level of devel-

opment of these communities' productive forces since there must be a 

potential surplus capable of constituting a State stock, of supporting a spe-

cialized handicrafts class (metallurgy), and of progressively giving rise to 

public functions. That is why Marx links the archaic State to a certain 

"mode of production." However, the origin of these Neolithic States is still 

being pushed back in time. What is at issue when the existence of 

near-Paleolithic empires is conjectured is not simply the quantity of time; 

the qualitative problem changes. Catal Hiiyiik, in Anatolia, makes 

possible a singularly reinforced imperial paradigm: it is a stock of 

uncultivated seeds and relatively tame animals from different territories 

that performs, and makes it possible to perform, at first by chance, 

hybridizations and selections from which agriculture and small-scale 
animal raising arise.

11

 It is easy to see the significance of this change in the 

givens of the problem. It is no longer the stock that presupposes a potential 

surplus, but the other way around. It is no longer the State that 

presupposes advanced agricultural communities and developed forces of 

production. On the contrary, the State is established directly in a milieu of 

hunter-gatherers having no prior

 

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agriculture or metallurgy, and it is the State that creates agriculture, animal 

raising, and metallurgy; it does so first on its own soil, then imposes them 

upon the surrounding world. It is not the country that progressively creates 

the town but the town that creates the country. It is not the State that pre-

supposes a mode of production; quite the opposite, it is the State that 

makes production a "mode." The last reasons for presuming a progressive 

development are invalidated. Like seeds in a sack: It all begins with a 

chance intermixing. The "state and urban revolution" may be Paleolithic, 

not Neolithic as Childe believed.

 

Evolutionism has been challenged in many different ways (zigzag move-

ments, stages skipped here or there, irreducible overall breaks). We have 

seen in particular how Pierre Clastres tried to shatter the evolutionist 

framework by means of the following two theses: (1) societies termed prim-

itive are not societies without a State, in the sense that they failed to reach a 

certain stage, but are counter-State societies organizing mechanisms that 

ward off the State-form, which make its crystallization impossible; (2) 

when the State arises, it is in the form of an irreducible break, since it is not 

the result of a progressive development of the forces of production (even 

the "Neolithic revolution" cannot be defined in terms of an economic 

infrastructure).

12

 However, one does not depart from evolutionism by 

establishing a clean break. In the final state of his work, Clastres main-

tained the preexistence and autarky of counter-State societies, and attrib-

uted their workings to an overmysterious presentiment of what they 

warded off and did not yet exist. More generally, one marvels at the bizarre 

indifference that ethnology manifests for archaeology. It seems as though 

ethnologists, fenced off in their respective territories, are willing to com-

pare their territories in an abstract, or structural, way, if it comes to that, 

but refuse to set them against archaeological territories that would com-

promise their autarky. They take snapshots of their primitives but rule out 

in advance the coexistence and superposition of the two maps, the 

ethnographical and the archaeological. Catal Hiiyuk, however, would have 

had a zone of influence extending two thousand miles; how can the 

ever-recurring problem of the relation of coexistence between primitive 

societies and empires, even those of Paleolithic times, be left unattended 

to? As long as archaeology is passed over, the question of the relation 

between ethnology and history is reduced to an idealist confrontation, and 

fails to wrest itself from the absurd theme of society without history, or 

society against history. Everything is not of the State precisely because 
there have been States always and everywhere. 
Not only does writing 

presuppose the State, but so do speech and language. The self-sufficiency, 

autarky, independence, preexistence of primitive communities, is an 

ethnological dream: not that these communities necessarily depend on 

States, but they

 

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coexist with them in a complex network. It is plausible that "from the 

beginning" primitive societies have maintained distant ties to one another, 

not just short-range ones, and that these ties were channeled through 

States, even if States effected only a partial and local capture of them. 

Speech communities and languages, independently of writing, do not 

define closed groups of people who understand one another but primarily 

determine relations between groups who do not understand one another: if 

there is language, it is fundamentally between those who do not speak the 

same tongue. Language is made for that, for translation, not for communi-

cation. And in primitive societies there are as many tendencies that "seek" 

the State, as many vectors working in the direction of the State, as there are 

movements within the State or outside it that tend to stray from it or guard 

themselves against it, or else to stimulate its evolution, or else already to 

abolish it: everything coexists, in perpetual interaction.

 

Economic evolutionism is an impossibility; even a ramified evolution, 

"gatherers—hunters—animal breeders—farmers-industrialists," is hardly 

believable. An evolutionary ethnology is no better: "nomads— 

seminomads—sedentaries." Nor an ecological evolutionism: "dispersed 

autarky of local groups—villages and small towns—cities—States." All we 

need to do is combine these abstract evolutions to make all of evolutionism 

crumble; for example, it is the city that creates agriculture, without going 

through small towns. To take another example, the nomads do not precede 

the sedentaries; rather, nomadism is a movement, a becoming that affects 

sedentaries, just as sedentarization is a stoppage that settles the nomads. 

Griaznov has shown in this connection that the most ancient nomadism 

can be accurately attributed only to populations that abandoned their 

semiurban sedentarity, or their primitive itineration, to set off nomadiz-

ing.

13

 It is under these conditions that the nomads invented the war 

machine, as that which occupies or fills nomad space and opposes towns 

and States, which its tendency is to abolish. Primitive peoples already had 

mechanisms of war that converged to prevent the State formation; but 

these mechanisms change when they gain autonomy in the form of a spe-

cific nomadism machine that strikes back against the States. We cannot, 

however, infer from this even a zigzag evolution that would go from primi-

tive peoples to States, from States to nomad war machines; or at least the 

zigzagging is not successive but passes through the loci of a topology that 

defines primitive societies here, States there, and elsewhere war machines. 

And even when the State appropriates the war machine, once again chang-

ing its nature, it is a phenomenon of transport, of transfer, and not one of 

evolution. The nomad exists only in becoming, and in interaction; the 

same goes for the primitive. All history does is to translate a coexistence 

of becomings into a succession. And collectivities can be transhumant,

 

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semisedentary, sedentary, or nomadic, without by the same token being 

preparatory stages for the State, which is already there, elsewhere or 

beside.

 

Can it at least be said that the hunter-gatherers are the "true" primitives 

and remain in spite of it all the basis or minimal presupposition of the State 

formation, however far back in time we place it? This point of view can be 

maintained only at the price of a very inadequate conception of causality. 

And it is true that the human sciences, with their materialist, evolutionary, 

and even dialectical schemas, lag behind the richness and complexity of 

causal relations in physics, or even in biology. Physics and biology present 

us with reverse causalities that are without finality but testify nonetheless 

to an action of the future on the present, or of the present on the past, for 

example, the convergent wave and the anticipated potential, which imply 

an inversion of time. More than breaks or zigzags, it is these reverse causal-

ities that shatter evolution. Similarly, in the present context, it is not ade-

quate to say that the Neolithic or even Paleolithic State, once it appeared, 

reacted back on the surrounding world of the hunter-gatherers; it was 

already acting before it appeared, as the actual limit these primitive socie-

ties warded off, or as the point toward which they converged but could not 

reach without self-destructing. These societies simultaneously have vec-

tors moving in the direction of the State, mechanisms warding it off, and a 

point of convergence that is repelled, set outside, as fast as it is approached. 

To ward off is also to anticipate. Of course, it is not at all in the same way 

that the State appears in existence, and that it preexists in the capacity of a 

warded-off limit; hence its irreducible contingency. But in order to give a 

positive meaning to the idea of a "presentiment" of what does not yet exist, 

it is necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already in 

action, in a different form than that of its existence. Once it has appeared, 

the State reacts back on the hunter-gatherers, imposing upon them agricul-

ture, animal raising, an extensive division of labor, etc.; it acts, therefore, in 

the form of a centrifugal or divergent wave. But before appearing, the State 

already acts in the form of the convergent or centripetal wave of the 

hunter-gatherers,  a wave that cancels itself out precisely at the point of 
convergence marking the inversion of signs or the appearance of the State 

(hence the functional and intrinsic instability of these primitive societies).

14

 

It is necessary from this standpoint to conceptualize the 

contemporaneousness or coexistence of the two inverse movements, of 

the two directions of time—of the primitive peoples "before" the State, 

and of the State "after" the primitive peoples—as if the two waves that seem 

to us to exclude or succeed each other unfolded simultaneously in an 

"archaeological," micropo-litical, micrological, molecular field.

 

There exist collective mechanisms that simultaneously ward off and

 

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anticipate the formation of a central power. The appearance of a central 

power is thus a function of a threshold or degree beyond which what is 

anticipated takes on consistency or fails to, and what is conjured away 

ceases to be so and arrives. This threshold of consistency, or of constraint, 

is not evolutionary but rather coexists with what has yet to cross it. More-

over, a distinction must be made between different thresholds of consis-

tency: the town and the State, however complementary, are not the same 

thing. The "urban revolution" and the "state revolution" may coincide but 

do not meld. In both cases, there is a central power, but it does not assume 

the same figure. Certain authors have made a distinction between the pala-

tial or imperial system (temple-palace), and the urban, town system. In 

both cases there is a town, but in one case the town is an outgrowth of the 

palace or temple, and in the other case the palace, the temple, is a concre-

tion of the town. In one case, the town par excellence is the capital, and in 

the other it is the metropolis. Sumer already attests to a town solution, as 

opposed to the imperial solution of Egypt. But to an even greater extent, it 

was the Mediterranean world, with the Pelasgians, Phoenicians, Greeks, 

Carthaginians, that created an urban fabric distinct from the imperial 

organisms of the Orient.

15

 Once again, the question is one not of evolution 

but of two thresholds of consistency that are themselves coexistent. They 

differ in several respects.

 

The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function 

of circulation, and of circuits; it is a remarkable point on the circuits that 

create it, and which it creates. It is defined by entries and exits; something 

must enter it and exit from it. It imposes a frequency. It effects a polariza-

tion of matter, inert, living or human; it causes the phylum, the flow, to pass 

through specific places, along horizontal lines. It is a phenomenon of 
transconsistency,  a  network,  because it is fundamentally in contact with 

other towns. It represents a threshold of deterritorialization, because what-

ever the material involved, it must be deterritorialized enough to enter the 

network, to submit to the polarization, to follow the circuit of urban and 

road recoding. The maximum deterritorialization appears in the tendency 

of maritime and commercial towns to separate off from the backcountry, 

from the countryside (Athens, Carthage, Venice). The commercial charac-

ter of the town has often been emphasized, but the commerce in question is 

also spiritual, as in a network of monasteries or temple-cities. Towns are 

circuit-points of every kind, which enter into counterpoint along horizon-

tal lines; they effect a complete but local, town-by-town, integration. Each 

one constitutes a central power, but it is a power of polarization or of the 

middle {milieu), of forced coordination. That is why this kind of power has 

egalitarian pretensions, regardless of the form it takes: tyrannical, demo-

cratic, oligarchic, aristocratic. Town power invents the idea of the magis-

 

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trature,  which is very different from the State civil-service sector 
(fonction-nariat).

16

 Who can say where the greatest civil violence resides?

 

The State indeed proceeds otherwise: it is a phenomenon of 

intracon-sistency.  It makes points resonate  together, points that are not 

necessarily already town-poles but very diverse points of order, geographic, 

ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities. It makes 

the town resonate with the countryside. It operates by stratification; in 

other words, it forms a vertical, hierarchized aggregate that spans the 

horizontal lines in a dimension of depth. In retaining given elements, it 

necessarily cuts off their relations with other elements, which become 

exterior, it inhibits, slows down, or controls those relations; if the State has 

a circuit of its own, it is an internal circuit dependent primarily upon 

resonance, it is a zone of recurrence that isolates itself from the remainder 

of the network, even if in order to do so it must exert even stricter controls 

over its relations with that remainder. The question is not to find out 

whether what is retained is natural or artificial (boundaries), because in 

any event there is deterntorialization. But in this case deterritorialization 

is a result of the territory itself being taken as an object, as a material to 

stratify, to make resonate. Thus the central power of the State is 

hierarchical, and constitutes a civil-service sector; the center is not in the 

middle  {au milieu), but on top, because the only way it can recombine 

what it isolates is through subordination. Of course, there is a multiplicity 

of States no less than of towns, but it is not the same type of multiplicity: 

there are as many States as there are vertical cross sections in a 

dimension of depth, each separated from the others, whereas the town is 

inseparable from the horizontal network of towns. Each State is a global 

(not local) integration, a redundancy of resonance (not of frequency), an 

operation of the stratification of the territory (not of the polarization of the 

milieu).

 

It is possible to reconstruct how primitive societies warded off both 

thresholds while at the same time anticipating them. Levi-Strauss has 

shown that the same villages are susceptible to two presentations, one 

segmentary and egalitarian, the other encompassing and hierarchized. 

These are like two potentials, one anticipating a central point common to 

two horizontal segments, the other anticipating a central point external to 

a straight line.

17

 Primitive societies do not lack formations of power; they 

even have many of them. But what prevents the potential central points 

from crystallizing, from taking on consistency, are precisely those mecha-

nisms that keep the formations of power both from resonating together in a 

higher point and from becoming polarized at a common point: the circles 

are not concentric, and the two segments require a third segment through 

which to communicate.

18

 This is the sense in which primitive societies 

have crossed neither the town-threshold nor the State-threshold.

 

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If we now turn our attention to the two thresholds of consistency, it is 

clear that they imply a deterritorialization in relation to the primitive ter-

ritorial codes. It is futile to ask which came first, the city or the State, the 

urban or state revolution, because the two are in reciprocal presupposi-

tion. Both the melodic lines of the towns and the harmonic cross sections 

of the States are necessary to effect the striation of space. The only ques-

tion that arises is the possibility that there may be an inverse relation at 

the heart of this reciprocity. For although the archaic imperial State nec-

essarily included towns of considerable size, they remained more or less 

strictly subordinated to the State, depending on how complete the State's 

monopoly over foreign trade was. On the other hand, the town tended to 

break free when the State's overcoding itself provoked decoded flows. A 

decoding was coupled with the deterritorialization, and amplified it; the 

necessary recoding was then achieved through a certain autonomy of the 

towns, or else directly through corporative and commercial towns freed 

from the State-form. Thus towns arose that no longer had a connection to 

their own land, because they assured the trade between empires, or better, 

constituted on their own a free commercial network with other towns. 

There is therefore an adventure specific to towns in the zones where the 

most intense decoding occurs, for example, the ancient Aegean world or 

the Western world of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Could it not 

be said that capitalism is the fruit of the towns, and arises when an urban 

recoding tends to replace State overcoding? This, however, was not the 

case. The towns did not create capitalism. The banking and commercial 

towns, being unproductive and indifferent to the backcountry, did not 

perform a recoding without also inhibiting the general conjunction of 

decoded flows. If it is true that they anticipated capitalism, they in turn 

did not anticipate it without also warding it off. They do not cross this 

new threshold. Thus it is necessary to expand the hypothesis of mecha-

nisms both anticipatory and inhibiting: these mechanisms are at play not 

only in primitive societies but also in the conflict of towns "against" the 

State and "against" capitalism. Finally, it was through the State-form and 

not the town-form that capitalism triumphed; this occurred when the 

Western States became models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded 

flows, and in that way resubjugated the towns. As Braudel says, there were 
"always two runners, the state and the town"—two forms and two speeds 

of deterritorialization—and "the state usually won. . . . everywhere in 

Europe, it disciplined the towns with instinctive relentlessness, whether 

or not it used violence.. . . [The states] caught up with the forward gallop 

of the towns."

19

 But the relation is a reciprocal one: if it is the modern 

State that gives capitalism its models of realization, what is thus realized 

is an independent, worldwide axiomatic that is like a single City,

 

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megalopolis, or "megamachine" of which the States are parts, or neigh-

borhoods.

 

We define social formations by machinic processes and not by modes of 

production (these on the contrary depend on the processes). Thus primi-

tive societies are defined by mechanisms of prevention-anticipation; State 

societies are defined by apparatuses of capture; urban societies, by instru-

ments of polarization; nomadic societies, by war machines; and finally 

international, or rather ecumenical, organizations are defined by the 

encompassment of heterogeneous social formations. But precisely because 

these processes are variables of coexistence that are the object of a social 

topology, the various corresponding formations are coexistent. And they 

coexist in two fashions, extrinsically and intrinsically. Primitive societies 

cannot ward off the formation of an empire or State without anticipating it, 

and they cannot anticipate it without its already being there, forming part 

of their horizon. And States cannot effect a capture unless what is captured 

coexists, resists in primitive societies, or escapes under new forms, as 

towns or war machines. . . The numerical composition of the war machine 

is superposed upon the primitive lineal organization and simultaneously 

opposes the geometric organization of the State and the physical organiza-

tion of the town. It is this extrinsic coexistence—interaction—that is 

brought to its own expression in international aggregates. For these obvi-

ously did not wait for capitalism before forming: as early as Neolithic 

times, even Paleolithic, we find traces of ecumenical organizations that tes-

tify to the existence of long-distance trade, and simultaneously cut across 

the most varied of social formations (as we have seen in the case of metal-

lurgy). The problem of diffusion, or of diffusionism, is badly formulated if 

one assumes a center at which the diffusion would begin. Diffusion occurs 

only through the placing in communication of potentials of very different 

orders: all diffusion happens in the in-between, goes between, like every-

thing that "grows" of the rhizome type. An international ecumenical 

organization does not proceed from an imperial center that imposes itself 

upon and homogenizes an exterior milieu; neither is it reducible to rela-

tions between formations of the same order, between States, for example 

(the League of Nations, the United Nations). On the contrary, it constitutes 

an intermediate milieu between the different coexistent orders. Therefore 

it is not exclusively commercial or economic, but is also religious, artistic, 

etc. From this standpoint, we shall call an international organization any-

thing that has the capacity to move through diverse social formations 

simultaneously: States, towns, deserts, war machines, primitive societies. 

The great commercial formations in history do not simply have city-poles, 

but also primitive, imperial, and nomadic segments through which they 

pass, perhaps issuing out again in another form. Samir Amin is totally cor-

 

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rect in saying that there can be no economic theory of international rela-

tions, even economic ones, because they sit astride heterogeneous forma-

tions.

20

 The point of departure for ecumenical organization is not a State, 

even an imperial one; the imperial State is only one part of it, and it consti-

tutes a part of it in its own mode, according to its own order, which consists 

in capturing everything it can. It does not proceed by progressive 

homoge-nization, or by totalization, but by the taking on of consistency or 

the consolidation of the diverse as such. For example, monotheistic 

religion is distinguished from territorial worship by its pretension to 

universality. But this pretension is not homogenizing, it makes itself felt 

only by spreading everywhere; this was the case with Christianity, which 

became imperial and urban, but not without giving rise to bands, deserts, 

war machines of its own.

21

 Similarly, there is no artistic movement that 

does not have its towns and empires, but also its nomads, bands, and 

primitives.

 

It might be objected that, at least in the case of capitalism, international 

economic relations, and at the limit all international relations, tend toward 

the homogenization of social formations. One could cite not only the cold 

and concerted destruction of primitive societies but also the fall of the last 

despotic formations, for example, the Ottoman Empire, which met capi-

talist demands with too much resistance and inertia. This objection, how-

ever, is only partially accurate. To the extent that capitalism constitutes an 

axiomatic (production for the market), all States and all social formations 

tend to become isomorphic in their capacity as models of realization: there 

is but one centered world market, the capitalist one, in which even the 

so-called socialist countries participate. Worldwide organization thus 

ceases to pass "between" heterogeneous formations since it assures the 

isomorphy of those formations. But it would be wrong to confuse 

isomorphy with homogeneity. For one thing, isomorphy allows, and even 

incites, a great heterogeneity among States (democratic, totalitarian, and, 

especially, "socialist" States are not facades). For another thing, the 

international capitalist axiomatic effectively assures the isomorphy of the 

diverse formations only where the domestic market is developing and 

expanding, in other words, in "the center." But it tolerates, in fact it 

requires, a certain peripheral polymorphy, to the extent that it is not satu-

rated, to the extent that it actively repels its own limits;

22

 this explains the 

existence, at the periphery, of heteromorphic social formations, which cer-
tainly do not constitute vestiges or transitional forms 
since they realize an 

ultramodern capitalist production (oil, mines, plantations, industrial 

equipment, steel, chemistry), but which are nonetheless precapitalist, or 

extracapitalist, owing to other aspects of their production and to the forced 

inadequacy of their domestic market in relation to the world market.

23 

When international organization becomes the capitalist axiomatic, it con-

 

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tinues to imply a heterogeneity of social formations, it gives rise to and 

organizes its "Third World."

 

There is not only an external coexistence of formations but also an 

intrinsic coexistence of machinic processes. Each process can also function 

at a "power" other than its own; it can be taken up by a power correspond-

ing to another process. The State as apparatus of capture has a power of 
appropriation; 
but this power does not consist solely in capturing all that it 

can, all that is possible, of a matter defined as phylum. The apparatus of 

capture also appropriates the war machine, the instruments of polariza-

tion, and the anticipation-prevention mechanisms. This is to say, con-

versely, that anticipation-prevention mechanisms have a high power of 
transference: 
they are at work not only in primitive societies, but move into 

the towns that ward off the State-form, into the States that ward off capital-

ism, into capitalism itself, insofar as it wards off and repels its own limits. 

And they are not satisfied to switch over to other powers but form new focal 

points of resistance and contagion, as we have seen in the case of "band" 

phenomena, which have their own towns, their own brand of international-

ism, etc. Similarly, war machines have a power of metamorphosis, which of 

course allows them to be captured by States, but also to resist that capture 

and rise up again in other forms, with other "objects" besides war (revolu-

tion?). Each power is a force of deterritorialization that can go along with 

the others or go against them (even primitive societies have their vectors of 

deterritorialization). Each process can switch over to other powers, but 

also subordinate other processes to its own power.

 

P

ROPOSITION 

XII. Capture.

 

Is it possible to conceive of an "exchange" between separate primitive 

groups, independent of any reference to such notions as stock, labor, and 

commodity? It seems that a modified marginalism provides a basis for a 

hypothesis. For the interest of marginalism resides not in its economic the-

ory, which is extremely weak, but in a logical power that makes Jevons, for 

example, a kind of Lewis Carroll of economics. Take two abstract groups, 

one of which (A) gives seeds and receives axes, while the other (B) does the 

opposite. What is the collective evaluation of the objects based on? It is 

based on the idea of the last objects received, or rather receivable, on each 

side. By "last" or "marginal" we must understand not the most recent, nor 

the final, but rather the penultimate, the next to the last, in other words, the 

last one before the apparent exchange loses its appeal for the exchangers, or 

forces them to modify their respective assemblages, to enter another 

assemblage. We will consider that the farmer-gatherer group A, which 

receives axes, has an "idea" of the number of axes that would force it to 

change assemblage; and the manufacturing group B, of the quantity of

 

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seeds that would force it to change assemblage. We may say, then, that the 

seed-ax relation is determined by the last quantity of seeds (for group B) 

corresponding to the last ax (for group A). The last as the object of a collec-

tive evaluation determines the value of the entire series. It marks the exact 

point at which the assemblage must reproduce itself, begin a new operation 

period or a new cycle, lodge itself on another territory, and beyond which 

the assemblage could not continue as such. This is indeed a 

next-to-the-last, a penultimate, since it comes before the ultimate. The 

ultimate is when the assemblage must change its nature: B would have to 

plant the excess seeds. A would have to increase the rhythm of its own 

plantings and remain on the same land.

 

We can now posit a conceptual difference between the "limit" and the 

"threshold": the limit designates the penultimate marking a necessary 

rebeginning, and the threshold the ultimate marking an inevitable change. 

It is an economic given of every enterprise to include an evaluation of the 

limit beyond which the enterprise would have to modify its structure. 

Marginalism claims to demonstrate the frequency of this penultimate 

mechanism: it applies not only to the last exchangeable objects but also to 

the last producible object, or the last producer him- or herself, the marginal 

or limit-producer before the assemblage changes.

24

 This is an economics of 

everyday life. For example, what does an alcoholic call the last glass? The 

alcoholic makes a subjective evaluation of how much he or she can tolerate. 

What can be tolerated is precisely the limit at which, as the alcoholic sees it, 

he or she will be able to start over again (after a rest, a pause ...). But 

beyond that limit there lies a threshold that would cause the alcoholic to 

change assemblage: it would change either the nature of the drinks or the 

customary places and hours of the drinking. Or worse yet, the alcoholic 

would enter a suicidal assemblage, or a medical, hospital assemblage, etc. 

It is of little importance that the alcoholic may be fooling him- or herself, or 

makes a very ambiguous use of the theme "I'm going to stop," the theme of 

the last one. What counts is the existence of a spontaneous marginal crite-

rion and marginalist evaluation determining the value of the entire series 

of "glasses." The same goes for having the last wordin a domestic-squabble 

assemblage. Both partners evaluate from the start the volume or density of 

the last word that would give them the advantage and conclude the discus-

sion, marking the end of an operation period or cycle of the assemblage, 

allowing it to start all over again. Both calculate their words in accordance 

with their evaluation of this last word, and the vaguely agreed time for it to 

come. And beyond the last (penultimate) word there lie still other words, 

this time final words that would cause them to enter another assemblage, 

divorce, for example, because they would have overstepped "bounds." The 

same could be said for the last love. Proust has shown how a love can be ori-

 

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ented toward its own limit, its own margin: it repeats its own ending. A new 

love follows, so that each love is serial, so that there is a series of loves. 

But once again, "beyond" lies the ultimate, at the point where the assem-

blage changes, where the assemblage of love is superseded by an artistic 

assemblage—the Work to be written, which is the problem Proust 

tackles...

 

Exchange is only an appearance: each partner or group assesses the 

value of the last receivable object (limit-object), and the apparent equiva-

lence derives from that. The equalization results from the two heterogene-

ous series, the exchange or communication results from two monologues 
(palabre). There is neither exchange value nor use value but rather an eval-

uation of the last by both parties (a calculation of the risk involved in cross-

ing the limit), an anticipation-evaluation that takes into account the ritual 

character as well as the utilitarian, the serial character as well as the 

exchangist. The evaluation of the limit is there from the start in both 

groups, and already governs the first "exchange" between them. Of course 

there is groping in the dark; the evaluation is inseparable from a collective 

feeling out. But it does not bear on the quantity of social labor but on the 

idea of the last on both sides; the speed with which it is accomplished var-

ies, but it is always done faster than the time necessary effectively to arrive 

at the last object, or even to pass from one operation to another.

25

 This is 

the sense in which the evaluation is essentially anticipatory, that it is 

already present in the first terms of the series. It can be seen that marginal 

utility (pertaining to the last objects receivable on both sides) is relative not 

to an abstractly posited stock but to the respective assemblages of the two 

groups. Pareto was moving in this direction when he spoke of "ophelimity" 

rather than of marginal utility.

26

 The issue is one ofdesirability as an assem-

blage component: every group desires according to the value of the last 

receivable object beyond which it would be obliged to change assemblage. 

And every assemblage has two sides, the machining of bodies or objects, 

and group enunciation. The evaluation of the last is the collective enuncia-

tion to which the entire series of objects corresponds; in other words, it is an 

assemblage cycle or operation period. Exchangist primitive groups thus 

appear to be serial groups. Theirs is a special regime, even with respect to 

violence. For even violence can be submitted to a marginal ritual treat-

ment, that is, to an evaluation of the "last violence" insofar as it impreg-

nates the entire series of blows (beyond which another regime of violence 

would begin). We previously defined primitive societies by the existence of 
anticipation-prevention  mechanisms. Now we can see more clearly how 

these mechanisms are constituted and distributed: it is the evaluation of 

the last as limit that constitutes an anticipation and simultaneously wards 

off the last as threshold or ultimate (a new assemblage).

 

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The threshold comes "after" the limit, "after" the last receivable objects: 

it marks the moment when the apparent exchange is no longer of interest. 

We believe that it is precisely at this moment that stockpiling begins; be-

forehand, there may be exchange granaries, granaries specifically for 

exchange purposes, but there is no stock in the strict sense. Exchange does 

not assume a preexistent stock, it assumes only a certain "elasticity." Stock-

piling begins only once exchange has lost its interest, its desirability for 

both parties. Additionally, conditions must exist giving stockpiling an 

interest in its own right, a desirability of its own (otherwise, the objects 

would be destroyed or depleted rather than stockpiled: depletion is the 

means by which primitive groups ward off the stock and maintain their 

assemblage). The stock depends on a new type of assemblage. The expres-

sions "after," "new," "to be superseded" are doubtless very ambiguous. The 

threshold is in fact already there, but outside the limit, which is satisfied to 

place the threshold at a distance, keep it at a distance. The problem is to 

know what this other assemblage is that gives the stock an actual interest, a 

desirability. The stock seems to us to have a necessary correlate: either the 
coexistence of simultaneously exploited territories, or a succession of exploi-
tations on one and the same territory. 
It is at this point that the territories 

form a Land, are superseded by a Land. This is the assemblage that neces-

sarily includes stockpiling, and which constitutes in the first case an exten-

sive system of cultivation, in the second case an intensive system of 

cultivation (following Jane Jacobs's paradigm). The way in which the 

stock-threshold differs from the exchange-limit is now clear: primitive 

assemblages of hunter-gatherers have an operation period defined by the 

exploitation of a territory; the law is one of temporal succession because 

the assemblage perseveres only by switching territories at the conclusion of 

each operation period (itinerancy, itineration); and within each operation 

period there is a repetition or temporal series that tends toward the last 

object as an "index," as the marginal or limit-object of the territory (this 

iteration will govern the apparent exchange). On the other hand, in the 

other assemblage, in the stock assemblage, the law is one of spatial coexis-

tence and concerns the simultaneous exploitation of different territories; 

or, when the exploitation is successive, the succession of operation periods 

bears on one and the same territory; and in the framework of each opera-

tion period or exploitation the force of serial iteration is superseded by a 

power of symmetry, reflection, and global comparison. In solely descrip-

tive terms, we therefore distinguish between serial, itinerant, or territorial 

assemblages (which operate by codes) and sedentary, global, or Land 

assemblages (which operate by overcoding).

 

Ground rent, in its abstract model, appears precisely when a compari-

son is drawn between different simultaneously exploited territories, or

 

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between the successive exploitations of the same territory. The worst land 

(or the poorest exploitation) bears no rent, but it makes it so that the other 

soils do bear rent, "produce" it in a comparative way.

27

 A stock is what per-

mits the yields to be compared (the same planting on different soils, or 

various successive plantings on the same soil). The category of the last con-

firms once again its economic importance, but it has totally changed mean-

ing: it no longer designates the end point of a self-fulfilling movement but 

the center of symmetry for two movements, one of which is descending and 

the other ascending; it no longer designates the limit of an ordinal series 

but the lowest element in a cardinal set, that set's threshold—the least fer-

tile land in the set of simultaneously exploited lands.

28

 Ground rent 

homogenizes, equalizes different conditions of productivity by linking the 

excess of the highest conditions of productivity over the lowest to a land-
owner: 
since the price (profit included) is established on the basis of the 

least productive land, rent taps the surplus profit accruing to the best lands; 

it taps "the difference between the product of two equal amounts of capital 

and labor."

29

 This is the very model of an apparatus of capture, inseparable 

from a process of relative deterritorialization. The land as the object of 

agriculture in fact implies a deterritorialization, because instead of people 

being distributed in an itinerant territory, pieces of land are distributed 

among people according to a common quantitative criterion (the fertility 

of plots of equal surface area). That is why the earth, unlike other elements, 

forms the basis of a striation, proceeding by geometry, symmetry, and com-

parison. The other elements, water, air, wind, and subsoil, cannot be stri-

ated and for that very reason bear rent only by virtue of their emplacement, 

in other words, as a function of the land.

30

 The land has two potentialities 

of deterritorialization: (1) its differences in quality are comparable to one 

another, from the standpoint of a quantity establishing a correspondence 

between them and exploitable pieces of land; (2) the set of exploited lands 

is appropriable, as opposed to exterior unclaimed land, from the stand-

point of a monopoly that fixes the landowner or -owners.

31

 The second 

potentiality is the necessary condition for the first. Both were warded off 

by the territory's territorialization of the earth but are now effectuated in 

the agricultural assemblage thanks to stockpiling, by means of a deter-

ritorialization of the territory. Land as compared and appropriated ex-

tracts from the territories a center of convergence located outside them; the 

land is an idea of the town.

 

Rent is not the only apparatus of capture. The stock has as its correlate 

not only the land, from the double point of view of the comparison of lands 

and the monopolistic appropriation of land; it has work as another corre-

late, from the double point of view of the comparison of activities and the 

monopolistic appropriation of labor (surplus labor). Once again, it is by

 

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virtue of the stock that activities of the "free action" type come to be com-

pared, linked, and subordinated to a common and homogeneous quantity 

called labor. Not only does labor concern the stock—either its constitu-

tion, conservation, reconstitution, or utilization—but labor itself is stock-

piled activity, just as the worker is a stockpiled "actant." Moreover, even 

when labor is clearly separated from surplus labor, they cannot be held to 

be independent: there is no so-called necessary labor, and beyond that sur-

plus labor. Labor and surplus labor are strictly the same thing; the first term 

is applied to the quantitative comparison of activities, the second to the 

monopolistic appropriation of labor by the entrepreneur (and no longer 

the landowner). As we have seen, even when they are distinct and separate, 

there is no labor that is not predicated on surplus labor. Surplus labor is not 

that which exceeds labor; on the contrary, labor is that which is subtracted 

from surplus labor and presupposes it. It is only in this context that one 

may speak of labor value, and of an evaluation bearing on the quantity of 

social labor, whereas primitive groups were under a regime of free action or 

activity in continuous variation. Since it depends on surplus labor and sur-

plus value, entrepreneurial profit is just as much an apparatus of capture as 

proprietary rent: not only does surplus labor capture labor, and 

landownership the earth, but labor and surplus labor are the apparatus of 

capture of activity, just as the comparison of lands and the appropriation of 

land are the apparatus of capture of the territory.

32

 

Finally, there is a third apparatus of capture in addition to rent and 

profit: taxation. To understand this third form, and its creative range, we 

must first determine the internal relation upon which the commodity 

depends. Edouard Will has shown, in relation to the Greek city and in par-

ticular the Corinthian tyranny, that money derived not from exchange, the 

commodity, or the demands of commerce, but from taxation, which first 

introduces the possibility of an equivalence money = goods or services and 

which makes money a general equivalent. In effect, money is a correlate of 

the stock; it is a subset of the stock in that it can be constituted by any object 

that can be preserved over the long term. In the case of Corinth, metal 

money was first distributed to the "poor" (in their capacity as producers). 

who used it to by land rights; it thus passed into the hands of the "rich," on 

the condition that it not stop there, that everyone, rich and poor, pay a tax, 

the poor in goods or services, the rich in money, such that an equivalence 

money-goods and services was established.

33

 We will return to the signifi-

cance of this reference to rich and poor in the already late case of Corinth. But 

beyond the context and particularities of this example, money is always 

distributed by an apparatus of power under conditions of conservation, 

circulation, and turnover, so that an equivalence goods-services-money 

can be established. We therefore do not believe in a succession.

 

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according to which labor rent would come first, followed by rent in kind, 
followed by money rent.

34

 It is directly in taxation that the equivalence and 

simultaneity of the three develop. As a general rule, it is taxation that 
monetarizes the economy; it is taxation that creates money, and it neces-
sarily creates it in motion, in circulation, with turnover, and also in a corre-
spondence with services and goods in the current of that circulation. The 
State finds in taxation the means for foreign trade, insofar as it appropri-
ates that trade. Yet it is not from trade but from taxation that the 
money-form derives.

35

 And the money-form thus derived from taxation 

makes possible a monopolistic appropriation of outside exchange by the 
State (monetarized trade). Everything is different in the regime of 
exchanges. We are no longer in the "primitive" situation where exchange is 
carried out indirectly, subjectively, through the respective equalization of 
the last receivable objects (the law of demand). Of course, exchange 
remains what it is in essence, that is to say, unequal, productive of an 
equalization resulting from inequality: but this time there is direct 
comparison, objective pricing, and monetary equalization (the law of 
supply). It is through taxation that goods and services come to be like 
commodities, and the commodity comes to be measured and equalized by 
money. That is why, even today, the meaning and impact of taxation 
appear in what is called indirect taxation, in other words, a tax that is 
included in the price and influences the value of the commodity, 
independent of and outside the market.

36 

However, the indirect tax is not 

simply an additional element that is tacked onto prices and inflates them. It 
is only the index or expression of a deeper movement, in which the tax 
constitutes the first layer of an "objective" price, the monetary magnet to 
which the other elements—price, rent, and profit—add on and adhere, 
converging in the same apparatus of capture. It was a great moment in 
capitalism when the capitalists realized that taxation could be productive, 
that it could be particularly favorable to profits and even to rents. But as 
with indirect taxation, this is a favorable case; it should not obscure an 
even deeper and more archaic accord, a convergence and essential identity 
between three aspects of a single apparatus. A three-headed apparatus of 
capture, a "trinity formula" derived from that of Marx (although it 
distributes things differently):

37

 

LAND

 

(as opposed to territory)

 

a)  Direct comparison of lands, dif-

ferential rent; 

b)  Monopolistic appropriation of 

land, absolute rent. 

Rent The 

Landowner

 

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WORK

 

(as opposed to activity)

 

Stock        a) Direct comparison of activities, 

Profit

 

labor; 

The Entrepreneur

 

b) Monopolistic appropriation of 

labor, surplus labor.

 

MONEY (as 

opposed to exchange)

 

a)  Direct comparison of the objects

 

exchanged, the commodity; 

Taxation

 

b)  Monopolistic appropriation of the 

The Banker 

means of comparison, the issu 

ance of currency.

 

1.  The stock has three simultaneous aspects: land and seeds, tools, 

money. Land is stockpiled territory, the tool is stockpiled activity, and 

money is stockpiled exchange. But the stock does not come from either ter-

ritories, activities, or exchanges. It marks another assemblage; it comes 

from that other assemblage. 

2.  That assemblage is the "megamachine," or the apparatus of capture, 

the archaic empire. It functions in three modes, which correspond to the 

three aspects of the stock: rent, profit, taxation. And the three modes con-

verge and coincide in it, in an agency of overcoding (or signifiance): the 

despot, at once the eminent landowner, entrepreneur of large-scale proj-

ects, and master of taxes and prices. This is like three capitalizations of 

power, or three articulations of "capital." 

3.  What forms the apparatus of capture are two operations always 

found in the convergent modes: direct comparison and monopolistic 

appropriation. And the comparison always presupposes the appropriation: 

labor presupposes surplus labor; differential rent presupposes absolute 

rent; commercial money presupposes taxation. The apparatus of capture 

constitutes a general space of comparison and a mobile center of 

appropriation. This is a white wall/black hole system of the kind that, as we 

have seen, constitutes the face of the despot. A point of resonance circu-

lates in a space of comparison and constitutes that space as it circulates. 

That is what distinguishes the State apparatus from primitive mecha-

nisms, with their noncoexistent territories and nonresonating centers. 

What begins with the State or the apparatus of capture is a general 

semiology that overcodes the primitive semiotic systems. Instead of traits 

of expression that follow a machinic phylum and wed it in a distribution of 

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singularities, the State constitutes a form of expression that subjugates the 

phylum: the phylum or matter is no longer anything more than an equa-

lized, homogenized, compared content, while expression becomes a form 

of resonance or appropriation. Apparatus of capture—the semiological 

operation par excellence... (In this sense, the associationist philosophers 

were not wrong in explaining political power by operations of the mind 

dependent upon the association of ideas.)

 

Bernard Schmitt has proposed a model of the apparatus of capture that 

takes into account the operations of comparison and appropriation. This 

model admittedly revolves around money as a capitalist economics. But it 

seems to be based on abstract principles that transcend these limits.

38

 

A.  The point of departure is an undivided flow that has yet to be ap 

propriated or compared, a "pure availability," "nonpossession and non- 

wealth": this is precisely what occurs when banks create money, but taken 

more generally it is the establishment of the stock, which is the creation of 

an undivided flow.

 

B.  The undivided flow becomes divided to the extent it is allocated to 

the "factors," distributed to the "factors." There is only one kind of factor, 

the immediate producers. We could call them the "poor" and say that the 

flow is distributed among the poor. But this would be inaccurate because 

there are no preexistent "rich." What counts, the important thing, is that 

the producers do not yet acquire possession of what is distributed to them, 

and that what is distributed to them is not yet wealth: remuneration 

assumes neither comparison and appropriation, nor buying-selling; it is 

much more an operation of the nexum type. There is only equality between 

set B and set A, between the distributed set and the undivided set. The dis 

tributed set could be called nominal wage; nominal wages are the form of 

expression of the entire undivided set ("the entire nominal expression," or 

as it is often put, "the expression of total national income"). This is the 

point at which the apparatus of capture becomes semiological.

 

C.  Thus it cannot even be said that wages, conceived as distribution, 

remuneration, constitute a purchase; on the contrary, purchasing power 

derives from wages: "The remuneration of the producers is not a purchase, 

it is the operation by which purchasing becomes possible in a second 

moment, when money begins to exercise its new power." It is after it has 

been distributed that set B becomes wealth, or acquires a comparative 

power, in relation to something else entirely. This something else is the 

determinate set of the goods that have been produced and are thus purchas 

able. At first heterogeneous to goods and products, money later becomes a 

good homogeneous to the products it can buy; it acquires a purchasing 

power that is extinguished with the real purchase. Or more generally, 

between the two sets, the distributed set B and the set of real goods C, there

 

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is established a correspondence, comparison ("the power of acquisition is 

created in direct conjunction with the set of real productions").

 

D. This is where the mystery or the magic resides, in a kind of disjunc-

tion. For if we call B' the comparative set, in other words, the set placed in 

correspondence with the real goods, we see that it is necessarily smaller 

than the distributed set. B' is necessarily smaller than B: even if we assume 

that purchasing power has available to it all of the objects produced during 

a given period, the distributed set is always greater than the set that is used 

or compared, meaning that the immediate producers are able to convert 

only a portion of the distributed set. Real wages are only a portion of nomi-

nal wages; similarly, "useful" labor is only a portion of labor, and "utilized" 

land is only a portion of the land that has been distributed. We shall call 

Capture this difference or excess constitutive of profit, surplus labor, or the 

surplus product: "Nominal wages include everything, but the wage-earners 

retain only the income they succeed in converting into goods; they lose the 

income siphoned off by the enterprises." It can be said that the whole was in 

fact distributed to the "poor"; the poor, however, find themselves extorted 

of everything they do not succeed in converting in the course of this strange 

race: the capture effects an inversion of the wave or of the divisible flow. It 

is precisely capture that is the object of monopolistic appropriation. And 

this appropriation (by the "rich") does not come after: it is included in 

nominal wages, while eluding real wages. It is between the two, it inserts 

itself between the distribution without possession and the conversion by 

correspondence or comparison; it expresses the difference in power 

between the two sets, between B' and B. In the end, there is no mystery at 

all: the mechanism of capture contributes from the outset to the constitution 
of the aggregate upon which the capture is effectuated.

 

This schema, according to its author, is very difficult to understand, and 

yet it is operative. It consists in bringing into relief an abstract machine of 

capture or of extortion by presenting a very specific "order of reasons." For 

example, remuneration is not itself a purchase since purchasing power 

derives from it. As Schmitt says, there is neither thief nor victim, for the 

producer only loses what he does not have and has no chance of acquiring: 

as in seventeenth-century philosophy, there are negations but not priva-

tion .. . And everything coexists in this logical apparatus of capture. Any 

succession is purely logical: the capture in itself appears between B and C, 

but exists as well between A and B, between C and A; it impregnates the 

entire apparatus, it acts as a nonlocalizable liaison for the system. The 

same goes for surplus labor: How could one specify its location since labor 

presupposes it? Now the State—the archaic imperial State in any case—is 

this very apparatus. It is always a mistake to appeal to a supplementary 

explanation for the State: this pushes the State back behind the State, ad

 

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infinitum. It is better to leave it where it is from the start, for it exists punc-

tually, beyond the limit of the primitive series. It is enough for this point of 

comparison and appropriation to be effectively occupied in order for the 

apparatus of capture to function, an apparatus that overcodes the primi-

tive codes, substitutes sets for the series, or reverses the direction of the 

signs. This point is necessarily occupied, effectuated, because it already 

exists in the convergent wave that moves through the primitive series and 

draws them toward a threshold at which, after passing their limits, the wave 

itself changes direction. Primitive peoples have always existed only as ves-

tiges, already plied by the reversible wave that carries them off (vector of 

deterritorialization). What is contingent upon external circumstances is 

only the place where the apparatus is effectuated—the place where the 

agricultural "mode of production" was able to arise: the Orient. It is in this 

sense that the apparatus is abstract. But in itself, it marks not simply an 

abstract possibility of reversibility but the real existence of a point of inver-

sion as an autonomous, irreducible phenomenon.

 

Hence the very particular character of State violence: it is very difficult 

to pinpoint this violence because it always presents itself as 

preaccom-plished. It is not even adequate to say that the violence rests with 

the mode of production. Marx made the observation in the case of 

capitalism: there is a violence that necessarily operates through the State, 

precedes the capitalist mode of production, constitutes the "primitive 

accumulation," and makes possible the capitalist mode of production itself. 

From a standpoint within the capitalist mode of production, it is very 

difficult to say who is the thief and who the victim, or even where the 

violence resides. That is because the worker is born entirely naked and 

the capitalist objectively "clothed," an independent owner. That which gave 

the worker and the capitalist this form eludes us because it operated in other 

modes of production. It is a violence that posits itself as preaccomplished, 

even though it is reactivated every day.

39

 This is the place to say it, if ever 

there was one: the mutilation is prior, preestablished. However, these 

analyses of Marx should be enlarged upon. For the fact remains that there 

is a primitive accumulation that, far from deriving from the agricultural 

mode of production, precedes it: as a general rule, there is primitive 

accumulation whenever an apparatus of capture is mounted, with that very 

particular kind of violence that creates or contributes to the creation of 

that which it is directed against, and thus presupposes itself.

40

 The problem 

then becomes one of distinguishing between regimes of violence. We can 

draw a distinction between struggle, war, crime and policing as so many 

regimes of violence. Struggle  would be like the regime of primitive 

violence (including primitive "wars"); it is a blow-by-blow violence, 

which is not without its code, since the value of the blows is fixed according 

to the law of the series, as a function of the value of

 

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the last exchangeable blow, or of the last woman to conquer, etc. Thus there 

is a certain ritualization of violence. War, at least when linked to the war 

machine, is another regime, because it implies the mobilization and 

autonomization of a violence directed first and essentially against the 

State apparatus (the war machine is in this sense the invention of a primary 

nomadic organization that turns against the State). Crime  is something 

else, because it is a violence of illegality that consists in taking possession of 

something to which one has no "right," in capturing something one does 

not have a "right" to capture. But State policing or lawful violence is some-

thing else again, because it consists in capturing while simultaneously 

constituting a right to capture. It is an incorporated, structural violence 

distinct from every kind of direct violence. The State has often been 

defined by a "monopoly of violence," but this definition leads back to 

another definition that describes the State as a "state of Law" 
(Rechts-staat).  State overcoding is precisely this structural violence that 

defines the law, "police" violence and not the violence of war. There is 

lawful violence wherever violence contributes to the creation of that which 

it is used against, or as Marx says, wherever capture contributes to the 

creation of that which it captures. This is very different from criminal 

violence. It is also why, in contradistinction to primitive violence, State or 

lawful violence always seems to presuppose itself, for it preexists its own 

use: the State can in this way say that violence is "primal," that it is simply a 

natural phenomenon the responsibility for which does not lie with the 

State, which uses violence only against the violent, against 

"criminals"—against primitives, against nomads—in order that peace 

may reign.

 

P

ROPOSITION 

XIII. The State and its forms.

 

We start with the archaic imperial State: overcoding, apparatus of cap-

ture, machine of enslavement. It comprises a particular kind of property, 

money, public works—a formula complete in a single stroke but one that 

presupposes nothing "private" and does not even assume a preexistent 

mode of production since it is what gives rise to the mode of production. 

The point of departure that the preceding analyses give us is well estab-

lished by archaeology. The question now becomes: Once the State has 

appeared, formed in a single stroke, how will it evolve? What are its factors 

of evolution or mutation, and what is the relation between evolved States 

and the archaic imperial State?

 

The principle of evolution is internal, whatever the external factors that 

contribute to it. The archaic State does not overcode without also freeing a 
large quantity of decoded flows that escape from it. 
Let us recall that "decod-

ing" does not signify the state of a flow whose code is understood (compris) 

(deciphered, translatable, assimilable), but, in a more radical sense, the

 

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state of a flow that is no longer contained in (compris dans) it own code, that 
escapes it own code. On the one hand, when the primitive codes cease to be 
self-regulating and are subordinated to the higher agency, flows that had been 
coded in a relative way by the primitive communities find the opportunity to 
escape. But on the other hand, the overcoding of the archaic State itself makes 
possible and gives rise to new flows that escape from it. 
The State does not 
created large-scale works without a flow of independent labor escaping its 
bureaucracy (notably in the mines and in metallurgy). It does not create the 
monetary form of the tax without flows of money escaping, and nourishing or 
bringing into being other powers (notably in commerce and banking). And above 
all, it does not created a system of public property without a flow of private 
appropriation growing up beside it, then beginning to pass beyond its grasp; this 
private property does not itself issue from the archaic system but is constituted 
on the margins, all the more necessarily and inevitably, slipping through the net 
of overcoding. It is undoubtedly Tokei who has formulated the problem of an 
origin of private property in the most serious way, in the context of a system that 
seems to exclude it from every angle. For private property can arise neither on 
the side of the emperor-despot not on the side of the peasants, whose autonomy 
is tied to communal possession, nor on the side of the functionaries whose 
existence and income are based on that public communal form ("the aristocrats 
can under these conditions become petty despots but not private landowners"). 
Even the slaves belong to the community or the public function. The question 
then becomes, Are there people who are constituted in the overcoding empire, 
but constituted as necessarily excluded and decoded? Tokei's answer is the freed 
slaves.  
It is they who have no place. It is their lamentations that are heard the 
length and breadth of the Chinese Empire: the plaint (elegy) has always been a 
political factor. But it is also they who form the first seeds of private property, 
who develop trade, and with metallurgy invent a kind of private slavery in which 
they will be the new master.

41

 We saw previously the role played by freed slaves 

in the war machine, in the formation of the special body. It is in a different form, 
and following entirely different principles, that they play an important role in the 
State apparatus and in the evolution of that apparatus, this time in the formation 
of a private body. The two aspects can combine, but they belong to two different 
lines. 

What counts is not the particular case of the freed slave.What counts is the 

collective figure of the Outsider. What counts is that in one way or another the 
apparatus of overcoding gives rise to flows that are themselves decoded—flows 
of money, labor, property. . . These flows are the correlate of the apparatus. And 
the correlation is not only social, internal to the archaic empire, it is also 
geographical. This would be the place to bring up 

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the confrontation between the East and the West. According to V. Gordon 

Childe's great archaeological thesis, the archaic imperial State implies a 

stockpiled agricultural surplus, which makes possible the maintenance of a 

specialized body of mercantile and metallurgical artisans. Indeed, the sur-

plus as the content proper to overcoding must be not only stockpiled but 

absorbed, consumed, realized. Doubtless, this economic requirement that 

the surplus be absorbed is one of the principal aspects of the appropriation 

of the war machine by the imperial State: The military institution is from 

the start one of the most effective means of absorbing surplus. If, however, 

we assume that the bureaucratic and military institutions are not enough, 

the way is cleared for this specialized body of nonagricultural artisans, 

whose labor will reinforce the sedentarization of agriculture. It was in 

Afro-Asia and the Orient that all of these conditions were fulfilled and 

that the State apparatus was invented: in the Middle East, Egypt, and 

Mesopotamia, but also in the valley of the Indus (and in the Far East). That 

was where agricultural stock and its bureaucratic, military, but also 

metallurgical and commercial concomitants came into being. But this 

oriental or imperial "solution" is threatened by an impasse: State 

overcoding keeps the metallurgists, both craft and mercantile, within strict 

bounds, under powerful bureaucratic control, with monopolistic 

appropriation of foreign trade in the service of a ruling class, so that the 

peasants themselves benefit little from the State innovations. So it is 

indeed true that the State-form spreads and that archaeology discovers it 

everywhere on the horizon of Western history in the Aegean world. But 

not under the same conditions. Minos and Mycenae are more a caricature 

of an empire, Agamemnon of Mycenae is not the Chinese emperor or 

Egyptian pharaoh; the Egyptian can say to the Greeks: "You will always 

be like children..." That is because the Aegean peoples were both too far 

away to fall into the oriental sphere and too poor to stockpile a surplus 

themselves, but neither far enough away nor impoverished enough to 

ignore the markets of the Orient. Moreover, oriental overcoding itself 

assigned its merchants a long-distance role. Thus the Aegean peoples 

found themselves in a situation where they could take advantage of the 

oriental agricultural stock without having to constitute one for themselves: 

they plundered it when they could, and on a more regular basis procured a 

share of it in exchange for raw materials (notably wood and metals), 

coming from as far away as Central and Western Europe. Of course, the 

Orient continually had to reproduce its stocks; but formally, it had made a 

move "once and for all," from which the West benefited without having to 

reproduce it. It follows that the metallurgical artisans and the merchants 

assumed an entirely different status in the West, since their existence did 

not directly depend on a surplus accumulated by a local State apparatus: 

even if the peasant suffered an exploitation as bad as or worse

 

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than that of the Orient, the artisan and the merchant enjoyed a freer status 

and a more diversified market, prefiguring a middle class. Many metallur-

gists and merchants from the Orient moved to the Aegean world, where 

they were to find freer, more varied and more stable conditions. In short, 
the same flows that are overcoded in the Orient tend to become decoded in 
Europe, 
in a new situation that is like the flipside or correlate of the other. 

Surplus value is no longer surplus value of code (overcoding) but becomes 

surplus value of flow. It is as if two solutions were found for the same prob-

lem, the Oriental solution and then the Western one, which grafts itself 

upon the first and brings it out of the impasse while continuing to presup-

pose it. The European metallurgist and merchant faced a much less thor-

oughly coded international market, one not limited to an imperial house or 

class. And as Childe said, the Western and Aegean States were immersed in 

a supranational economic system from the start; they bathed in it, instead 

of containing it within the limits of their own net.

42

 

It is indeed another pole of the State that arises, one that could be 

defined in summary fashion as follows. The public sphere no longer charac-

terizes the objective nature of property but is instead the shared means for 

a now private appropriation; this yields the public-private mixes constitu-

tive of the modern world. The bond becomes personal; personal relations of 

dependence, both between owners (contracts) and between owned and 

owners (conventions), parallel or replace community relations or relations 

based on one's public function. Even slavery changes; it no longer defines 

the public availability of the communal worker but rather private property 

as applied to individual workers.

43

 The law  in its entirety undergoes a 

mutation, becoming subjective, conjunctive, "topical" law: this is because 

the State apparatus is faced with a new task, which consists less in 

overcoding already coded flows than in organizing conjunctions of decoded 
flows as such. 
Thus the regime of signs has changed: in all of these respects, 

the operation of the imperial "signifier" has been superseded by processes 
of subjedification; 
machinic enslavement tends to be replaced by a regime 

of social subjection. And unlike the relatively uniform imperial pole, this 

second pole presents the most diverse of forms. But as varied as relations of 

personal dependence are, they always mark qualified and topical conjunc-

tions. It was the evolved empires, of the East and of the West, that first 

developed this new public sphere of the private, through institutions such 

as the consilium and the fiscus in the Roman Empire (it was through these 

institutions that freed slaves acquired a political power paralleling that of 

the functionaries).

44

 But it was also the autonomous cities, the feudal sys-

tems. .. The question as to whether these last-mentioned formations still 

answer to the concept of the State can be formulated only after certain cor-

relations have been taken into account. Every bit as much as the evolved

 

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empires, the autonomous cities, and feudal systems presuppose an archaic 

empire that served as their foundation; they were themselves in contact 

with evolved empires that reacted back upon them; they actively prepared 

the way for new forms of the State (for example, absolute monarchy as the 

culmination of a certain kind of subjective law and a feudal process).

45

 In 

effect, in the rich domain of personal relations, what counts is not the 

capriciousness or variability of the individuals but the consistency of the 

relations, and the adequation between a subjectivity that can reach the 

point of delirium and qualified acts that are sources of rights and obliga-

tions. In a beautiful passage, Edgar Quinet underlines this coincidence 

between "the delirium of the twelve Cesars and the golden age of Roman 

law."

46

 

The subjectifications, conjunctions, and appropriations do not prevent 

the decoded flows from continuing to flow, and from ceaselessly engender-

ing new flows that escape (we saw this, for example, at the level of a 

micropolitics of the Middle Ages). This is where there is an ambiguity in 

these apparatuses: they can only function with decoded flows, and yet they 

do not let them stream together; they perform topical conjunctions that 

stand as so many knots or recodings. This accounts for the historians' 

impression that capitalism "could have" developed beginning at a certain 

moment, in China, in Rome, in Byzantium, in the Middle Ages, that the 

conditions for it existed but were not effectuated or even capable of being 

effectuated. The situation is that the pressure of the flows draws capitalism 

in negative outline, but for it to be realized there must be a whole integral of 
decoded flows, 
a whole generalized conjunction that overspills and over-

turns the preceding apparatuses. And in fact when Marx sets about defin-

ing capitalism, he begins by invoking the advent of a single unqualified and 

global Subjectivity, which capitalizes all of the processes of 

subjectifica-tion, "all activities without distinction": "productive activity 

in general," "the sole subjective essence of wealth . . ." And this single 

Subject now expresses itself in an Object in general, no longer in this or 

that qualitative state: "Along with the abstract universality of 

wealth-creating activity we have now the universality of the object defined 

as wealth, viz. the product in general, or labor in general, but as past, 

materialized labor."

47

 Circulation constitutes capital as a subjectivity 

commensurate with society in its entirety. But this new social subjectivity 

can form only to the extent that the decoded flows overspill their 

conjunctions and attain a level of decoding that the State apparatuses are 

no longer able to reclaim: on the one hand, the flow of labor must no 

longer be determined as slavery or serfdom but must become naked and free 

labor; and on the other hand, wealth must no longer be determined as 

money dealing, merchant's or landed wealth, but must become pure 

homogeneous and independent capital. And doubt-

 

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less, these two becomings at least (for other flows also converge) introduce 

many contingencies and many different factors on each of the lines. But it 

is their abstract conjunction in a single stroke that constitutes capitalism, 

providing a universal subject and an object in general for one another. Cap-

italism forms when the flow of unqualified wealth encounters the flow of 

unqualified labor and conjugates with it.

48

 This is what the preceding con-

junctions, which were still topical or qualitative, had always inhibited (the 

two principal inhibitors were the feudal organization of the countryside 

and the corporative organization of the towns). This amounts to saying 

that capitalism forms with a general axiomatic of decoded flows. "Capital is 

a right, or, to be more precise, a relation of production that is manifested as 

a right, and as such it is independent of the concrete form that it cloaks at 

each moment of its productive function."

49

 Private property no longer 

expresses the bond of personal dependence but the independence of a Sub-

ject that now constitutes the sole bond. This makes for an important differ-

ence in the evolution of private property: private property in itself relates 

to rights, instead of the law relating it to the land, things, or people (this 

raises in particular the famous question of the elimination of ground rent 

in capitalism). A new threshold of deterritorialization. And when capital 

becomes an active right in this way, the entire historical figure of the law 

changes. The law ceases to be the overcoding of customs, as it was in the 

archaic empire; it is no longer a set of topics, as it was in the evolved States, 

the autonomous cities, and the feudal systems; it increasingly assumes the 

direct form and immediate characteristics of an axiomatic, as evidenced in 

our civil "code."

50

 

When the flows reach this capitalist threshold of decoding and deterri-

torialization (naked labor, independent capital), it seems that there is no 

longer a need for a State, for distinct juridical and political domination, in 

order to ensure appropriation, which has become directly economic. The 

economy constitutes a worldwide axiomatic, a "universal cosmopolitan 

energy which overflows every restriction and bond,"

51

 a mobile and con-

vertible substance "such as the total value of annual production." Today we 

can depict an enormous, so-called stateless, monetary mass that circulates 

through foreign exchange and across borders, eluding control by the States, 

forming a multinational ecumenical organization, constituting a de facto 

supranational power untouched by governmental decisions.

52

 But what-

ever dimensions or quantities this may have assumed today, capitalism has 

from the beginning mobilized a force of deterritorialization infinitely sur-

passing the deterritorialization proper to the State. For since Paleolithic 

and Neolithic times, the State has been deterritorializing to the extent that 

it makes the earth an object of its higher unity, a forced aggregate of coexis-

tence, instead of the free play of territories among themselves and with the

 

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lineages. But this is precisely the sense in which the State is termed "terri-

torial." Capitalism, on the other hand, is not at all territorial, even in its 

beginnings: its power of deterritorialization consists in taking as its object, 

not the earth, but "materialized labor," the commodity. And private prop-

erty is no longer ownership of the land or the soil, nor even of the means of 

production as such, but of convertible abstract rights.

53

 That is why capital-

ism marks a mutation in worldwide or ecumenical organizations, which 

now take on a consistency of their own: the worldwide axiomatic, instead 

of resulting from heterogeneous social formations and their relations, for 

the most part distributes these formations, determines their relations, 

while organizing an international division of labor. From all these stand-

points, it could be said that capitalism develops an economic order that 

could do without the State. And in fact capitalism is not short on war cries 

against the State, not only in the name of the market, but by virtue of its 

superior deterritorialization.

 

This, however, is only one very partial aspect of capital. If it is true that 

we are not using the word axiomatic as a simple metaphor, we must review 

what distinguishes an axiomatic from all manner of codes, overcodings, 

and recodings: the axiomatic deals directly with purely functional ele-

ments and relations whose nature is not specified, and which are immedi-

ately realized in highly varied domains simultaneously; codes, on the other 

hand, are relative to those domains and express specific relations between 

qualified elements that cannot be subsumed by a higher formal unity 

(overcoding) except by transcendence and in an indirect fashion. The 
immanent axiomatic finds in the domains it moves through so many mod-

els, termed models of realization. It could similarly be said that capital as 

right, as a "qualitatively homogeneous and quantitatively commensurable 

element," is realized in sectors and means of production (or that "unified 

capital" is realized in "differentiated capital"). However, the different sec-

tors are not alone in serving as models of realization—the States do too. 

Each of them groups together and combines several sectors, according to 

its resources, population, wealth, industrial capacity, etc. Thus the States, 

in capitalism, are not canceled out but change form and take on a new 

meaning: models of realization for a worldwide axiomatic that exceeds 

them. But to exceed is not at all the same thing as doing without. We have 

already seen that capitalism proceeds by way of the State-form rather than 

the town-form; the basis for the fundamental mechanisms described by 

Marx (the colonial regime, the public debt, the modern tax system and 

indirect taxation, industrial protectionism, trade wars) may be laid in the 

towns, but the towns function as mechanisms of accumulation, accelera-

tion, and concentration only to the extent that they are appropriated by 

States. Recent events tend to confirm this principle from another angle.

 

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For example, NASA appeared ready to mobilize considerable capital for 
interplanetary exploration, as though capitalism were riding a vector tak-
ing it to the moon; but following the USSR, which conceived of extraterres-
trial space as a belt that should circle the earth taken as the "object," the 
American government cut off funds for exploration and returned capital in 
this case to a more centered model. It is thus proper to State 
deterrito-rialization to moderate the superior deterritorialization of capital 
and to provide the latter with compensatory reterritorializations. More 
generally, this extreme example aside, we must take into account a 
"materialist" determination of the modern State or nation-state: a group of 
producers in which labor and capital circulate freely, in other words, in 
which the homogeneity and competition of capital is effectuated, in 
principle without external obstacles. In order to be effectuated, capitalism 
has always required there to be a new force and a new law of States, on the 
level of the flow of labor as on the level of the flow of independent 
capital.

 

So States are not at all transcendent paradigms of an overcoding but 

immanent models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded flows. Once 
again, our use of the word "axiomatic" is far from a metaphor; we find liter-
ally the same theoretical problems that are posed by the models in an axio-
matic repeated in relation to the State. For models of realization, though 
varied, are supposed to be isomorphic with regard to the axiomatic they 
effectuate; however, this isomorphy, concrete variations considered, 
accommodates itself to the greatest of formal differences. Moreover, a sin-
gle axiomatic seems capable of encompassing polymorphic models, not 
only when it is not yet "saturated," but with those models as integral ele-
ments of its saturation.

54

 These "problems" become singularly political 

when we think of modern States.

 

1.  Are not all modern States isomorphic in relation to the capitalist axi-

omatic, to the point that the difference between democratic, totalitarian, 
liberal, and tyrannical States depends only on concrete variables, and on 
the worldwide distribution of those variables, which always undergo even-
tual readjustments? Even the so-called socialist States are isomorphic, to 
the extent that there is only one world market, the capitalist one. 

2.  Conversely, does not the world capitalist axiomatic tolerate a real 

polymorphy, or even a heteromorphy, of models, and for two reasons? On 
the one hand, capital as a general relation of production can very easily 
integrate concrete sectors or modes of production that are noncapitalist. 
But on the other hand, and this is the main point, the bureaucratic socialist 
States can themselves develop different modes of production that only 
conjugate with capitalism to form a set whose "power" exceeds that of the 
axiomatic itself (it will be necessary to try to determine the nature of this 

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power, why we so often think of it in apocalyptic terms, what conflicts it 

spawns, what slim chances it leaves us.. .)•

 

3. A typology of modern States is thus coupled with a metaeconomics: 

it would be inaccurate to treat all States as "interchangeable" (even 

isomorphy does not have that consequence), but it would be no less inac-

curate to privilege a certain form of the State (forgetting that polymorphy 

establishes strict complementarities between the Western democracies 

and the colonial or neocolonial tyrannies that they install or support in 

other regions) or to equate the bureaucratic socialist States with the totali-

tarian capitalist States (neglecting the fact that the axiomatic can encom-

pass a real heteromorphy from which the higher power of the aggregate 

derives, even if it is for the worse).

 

What is called a nation-state, in the most diverse forms, is precisely the 

State as a model of realization. And the birth of nations implies many arti-

fices: Not only are they constituted in an active struggle against the imper-

ial or evolved systems, the feudal systems, and the autonomous cities, but 

they crush their own "minorities," in other words, minoritarian phenom-

ena that could be termed "nationalitarian," which work from within and if 

need be turn to the old codes to find a greater degree of freedom. The con-

stituents of the nation are a land and a people: the "natal," which is not nec-

essarily innate, and the "popular," which is not necessarily pregiven. The 

problem of the nation is aggravated in the two extreme cases of a land with-

out a people and a people without a land. How can a people and a land be 

made, in other words, a nation—a refrain? The coldest and bloodiest 

means vie with upsurges of romanticism. The axiomatic is complex, and is 

not without passions. The natal or the land, as we have seen elsewhere, 

implies a certain deterritorialization of the territories (community land, 

imperial provinces, seigneurial domains, etc.), and the people, a decoding 

of the population. The nation is constituted on the basis of these flows and 

is inseparable from the modern State that gives consistency to the corre-

sponding land and people. It is the flow of naked labor that makes the peo-

ple, just as it is the flow of Capital that makes the land and its industrial 

base. In short, the nation is the very operation of a collective 

subjecti-fication, to which the modern State corresponds as a process of 

subjection. It is in the form of the nation-state, with all its possible 

variations, that the State becomes the model of realization for the capitalist 

axiomatic. This is not at all to say that nations are appearances or 

ideological phenomena; on the contrary, they are the passional and living 

forms in which the qualitative homogeneity and the quantitative 

competition of abstract capital are first realized.

 

We distinguish machinic enslavement and social subjection as two sepa-

rate concepts. There is enslavement when human beings themselves are

 

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constituent pieces of a machine that they compose among themselves and 

with other things (animals, tools), under the control and direction of a 

higher unity. But there is subjection when the higher unity constitutes the 

human being as a subject linked to a now exterior object, which can be an 

animal, a tool, or even a machine. The human being is no longer a compo-

nent of the machine but a worker, a user. He or she is subjected to the 

machine and no longer enslaved by the machine. This is not to say that the 

second regime is more human. But the first regime does seem to have a spe-

cial relation to the archaic imperial formation: human beings are not sub-

jects but pieces of a machine that overcodes the aggregate (this has been 

called "generalized slavery," as opposed to the private slavery of antiquity, 

or feudal serfdom). We believe that Lewis Mumford is right in designating 

the archaic empires megamachines, and in pointing out that, once again, it 

is not a question of a metaphor: "If a machine can be defined more or less in 

accord with the classic definition of Reuleaux, as a combination of resist-

ant parts, each specialized in function, operating under human control to 

transmit motion and to perform work, then the human machine was a real 

machine."

55

 Of course, it was the modern State and capitalism that brought 

the triumph of machines, in particular of motorized machines (whereas 

the archaic State had simple machines at best); but what we are referring to 

now are technical machines, which are definable extrinsically. One is not 

enslaved by the technical machine but rather subjected to it. It would 

appear, then, that the modern State, through technological development, 

has substituted an increasingly powerful social subjection for machinic 

enslavement. Ancient slavery and feudal serfdom were already procedures 

of subjection. But the naked or "free" worker of capitalism takes subjection 

to its most radical expression, since the processes of subjectification no 

longer even enter into partial conjunctions that interrupt the flow. In 

effect, capital acts as the point of subjectification that constitutes all 

human beings as subjects; but some, the "capitalists," are subjects of enun-

ciation that form the private subjectivity of capital, while the others, the 

"proletarians," are subjects of the statement, subjected to the technical 

machines in which constant capital is effectuated. The wage regime can 

therefore take the subjection of human beings to an unprecedented point, 

and exhibit a singular cruelty, yet still be justified in its humanist cry: No, 

human beings are not machines, we don't treat them like machines, we cer-

tainly don't confuse variable capital and constant capital.. .

 

Capitalism arises as a worldwide enterprise of subjectification by con-

stituting an axiomatic of decoded flows. Social subjection, as the correlate 

of subjectification, appears much more in the axiomatic's models of real-

ization than in the axiomatic itself. It is within the framework of the 

nation-State, or of national subjectivities, that processes of subjectifica-

 

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tion and the corresponding subjections are manifested. The axiomatic 

itself, of which the States are models of realization, restores or reinvents, in 

new and now technical forms, an entire system of machinic enslavement. 

This in no way represents a return to the imperial machine since we are now 

in the immanence of an axiomatic, and not under the transcendence of a 

formal Unity. But it is the reinvention of a machine of which human beings 

are constituent parts, instead of subjected workers or users. If motorized 

machines constituted the second age of the technical machine, cybernetic 

and informational machines form a third age that reconstructs a gener-

alized regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible "humans-machines 

systems" replace the old nonrecurrent and nonreversible relations of sub-

jection between the two elements; the relation between human and 

machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on 

usage or action.

56

 In the organic composition of capital, variable capital 

defines a regime of subjection of the worker (human surplus value), the 

principal framework of which is the business or factory. But with automa-

tion comes a progressive increase in the proportion of constant capital; we 

then see a new kind of enslavement: at the same time the work regime 

changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and the framework expands to 

all of society. It could also be said that a small amount of subjectification 

took us away from machinic enslavement, but a large amount brings us 

back to it. Attention has recently been focused on the fact that modern 

power is not at all reducible to the classical alternative "repression or ideol-

ogy" but implies processes of normalization, modulation, modeling, and 

information that bear on language, perception, desire, movement, etc., 

and which proceed by way of microassemblages. This aggregate includes 

both subjection and enslavement taken to extremes, as two simultaneous 

parts that constantly reinforce and nourish each other. For example, one is 

subjected to TV insofar as one uses and consumes it, in the very particular 

situation of a subject of the statement that more or less mistakes itself for a 

subject of enunciation ("you, dear television viewers, who make TV what it 

is . . ."); the technical machine is the medium between two subjects. But 

one is enslaved by TV as a human machine insofar as the television viewers 

are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly 

"make" it, but intrinsic component pieces, "input" and "output," feedback 

or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as 

to produce or use it. In machinic enslavement, there is nothing but trans-

formations and exchanges of information, some of which are mechanical, 

others human.

57

 The term "subjection," of course, should not be confined 

to the national aspect, with enslavement seen as international or world-

wide. For information technology is also the property of the States that set 

themselves up as humans-machines systems. But this is so precisely to the

 

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extent that the two aspects, the axiomatic and the models of realization, 

constantly cross over into each other and are themselves in communica-

tion. Social subjection proportions itself to the model of realization, just as 

machinic enslavement expands to meet the dimensions of the axiomatic 

that is effectuated in the model. We have the privilege of undergoing the 

two operations simultaneously, in relation to the same things and the same 

events. Rather than stages, subjection and enslavement constitute two 

coexistent poles.

 

We may return to the different forms of the State, from the standpoint of 

a universal history. We distinguish three major forms: (1) imperial archaic 

States, which are paradigms and constitute a machine of enslavement by 

overcoding already-coded flows (these States have little diversity, due to a 

certain formal immutability that applies to all of them); (2) extremely 

diverse States—evolved empires, autonomous cities, feudal systems, 

monarchies—which proceed instead by subjectification and subjection, 

and constitute qualified or topical conjunctions of decoded flows; 3) the 

modern nation-States, which take decoding even further and are models of 

realization for an axiomatic or a general conjugation of flows (these States 

combine social subjection and the new machinic enslavement, and their 

very diversity is a function of isomorphy, of the eventual heteromorphy or 

polymorphy of the models in relation to the axiomatic).

 

There are, of course, all kinds of external circumstances that mark pro-

found breaks between these types of States, and above all submit the 

archaic empires to utter oblivion, a shrouding lifted only by archaeology. 

The empires disappeared suddenly, as though in an instantaneous catas-

trophe. As in the Dorian invasion, a war machine looms up and bears down 

from without, killing memory. Yet things proceed quite differently on the 

inside, where all the States resonate together, appropriate armies for them-

selves, and exhibit a unity of composition in spite of their differences in 

organization and development. It is evident that all decoded flows, of 

whatever kind, are prone to forming a war machine directed against the 

State. But everything changes depending on whether these flows connect 

up with a war machine or, on the contrary, enter into conjunctions or a gen-

eral conjugation that appropriates them for the State. From this stand-

point, the modern States have a kind of transspatiotemporal unity with the 

archaic State. The internal correlation between 1 and 2 appears most 

clearly in the fact that the fragmented forms of the Aegean world presup-

pose the great imperial form of the Orient and find in it a stock or agricul-

tural surplus, which they consequently have no need to produce or 

accumulate for themselves. And to the extent that the States of the second 

age are nevertheless obliged to reconstitute a stock, if only because of exter-

nal circumstances—what State can do without one?—in so doing they

 

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always reactivate an evolved imperial form. We find the revival of this 

form in the Greek, Roman, and feudal worlds: there is always an empire on 

the horizon, which for the subjective States plays the role of signifier and 

encompassing element. And the correlation between 2 and 3 is no less pro-

nounced, for industrial revolutions are not wanting, and the difference 

between topical conjunctions and the great conjugation of decoded flows is 

so thin that one is left with the impression that capitalism was continually 

being born, disappearing and reviving at every crossroads of history. And 

the correlation between 3 and 1 is also a necessary one: the modern States 

of the third age do indeed restore the most absolute of empires, a new 

"megamachine," whatever the novelty or timeliness of its now immanent 

form; they do this by realizing an axiomatic that functions as much by 

machinic enslavement as by social subjection. Capitalism has reawakened 

the Urstaat, and given it new strength.

58

 

Not only, as Hegel said, does every State imply "the essential moments 

of its existence as a State," but there is a unique moment, in the sense of a 

coupling of forces, and this moment of the State is capture, bond, knot, 
nexum,  magical capture. Must we speak of a second pole, which would 

operate instead by pact and contract? Is this not instead that other force, 

with capture as the unique moment of coupling? For the two forces are the 

overcoding of coded flows, and the treatment of decoded flows. The con-

tract is a juridical expression of the second aspect: it appears as the pro-

ceeding of subjectification, the outcome of which is subjection. And the 

contract must be pushed to the extreme; in other words, it is no longer con-

cluded between two people but between self and self, within the same 

person—Ich = Ich—as subjected and sovereign. The extreme perversion 

of the contract, reinstating the purest of knots. The knot, bond, capture, 

thus travel a long history: first, the objective, imperial collective bond; then 

all of the forms of subjective personal bonds; finally, the Subject that binds 

itself, and in so doing renews the most magical operation, "a cosmopolitan, 

universal energy which overflows every restriction and bond so as to estab-

lish itself instead as the sole bond."

59

 Even subjection is only a relay for the 

fundamental moment of the State, namely, civil capture or machinic 

enslavement. The State is assuredly not the locus of liberty, nor the agent of 

a forced servitude or war capture. Should we then speak of "voluntary ser-

vitude"? This is like the expression "magical capture": its only merit is to 

underline the apparent mystery. There is a machinic enslavement, about 

which it could be said in each case that it presupposes itself, that it appears 

as preaccomplished; this machinic enslavement is no more "voluntary" 

than it is "forced."

 

P

ROPOSITION 

XIV. Axiomatics and the presentday situation.

 

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Politics is by no means an apodictic science. It proceeds by experimen-

tation, groping in the dark, injection, withdrawal, advances, retreats. The 

factors of decision and prediction are limited. It is an absurdity to postu-

late a world supergovernment that makes the final decisions. No one is 

even capable of predicting the growth in the money supply. Similarly, the 

States are affected by all kinds of coefficients of uncertainty and unpredict-

ability. John Kenneth Galbraith and Francois Chatelet have formulated 

the concept of constant and decisive errors, which make the glory of men of 

State no less than their rare successful evaluations. But that is just one 

more reason to make a connection between politics and axiomatics. For in 

science an axiomatic is not at all a transcendent, autonomous, and 

decision-making power opposed to experimentation and intuition. On the 

one hand, it has its own gropings in the dark, experimentations, modes of 

intuition. Axioms being independent of each other, can they be added, and 

up to what point (a saturated system)? Can they be withdrawn (a "weak-

ened" system)? On the other hand, it is of the nature of axiomatics to come 

up against so-called undecidable propositions, to confront necessarily 
higher powers 
that it cannot master.

60

 Finally, axiomatics does not consti-

tute the cutting edge of science; it is much more a stopping point, a reorder-

ing that prevents decoded semiotic flows in physics and mathematics from 

escaping in all directions. The great axiomaticians are the men of State of 

science, who seal off the lines of flight that are so frequent in mathematics, 

who would impose a new nexum, if only a temporary one, and who lay 

down the official policies of science. They are the heirs of the theorematic 

conception of geometry. When intuitionism opposed axiomatics, it was 

not only in the name of intuition, of construction and creation, but also in 

the name of a calculus of problems, a problematic conception of science 

that was not less abstract but implied an entirely different abstract 

machine, one working in the undecidable and the fugitive.

61

 It is the real 

characteristics of axiomatics that lead us to say that capitalism and pres-

ent-day politics are an axiomatic in the literal sense. But it is precisely for 

this reason that nothing is played out in advance. From this standpoint, we 

may present a summary sketch of the "givens."

 

1. Addition, subtraction. The axioms of capitalism are obviously not 

theoretical propositions, or ideological formulas, but operative statements 

that constitute the semiological form of Capital and that enter as compo-

nent parts into assemblages of production, circulation, and consumption. 

The axioms are primary statements, which do not derive from or depend 

upon another statement. In this sense, a flow can be the object of one or 

several axioms (with the set of all axioms constituting the conjugation of 

the flows); but it can also lack any axioms of its own, its treatment being

 

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only a consequence of other axioms; finally, it can remain out of bounds, 

evolve without limits, be left in the state of an "untamed" variation in the 

system. There is a tendency within capitalism continually to add more axi-

oms. After the end of World War I, the joint influence of the world depres-

sion and the Russian Revolution forced capitalism to multiply its axioms, 

to invent new ones dealing with the working class, employment, union 

organization, social institutions, the role of the State, the foreign and 

domestic markets. Keynesian economics and the New Deal were axiom 

laboratories. Examples of the creation of new axioms after the Second 

World War: the Marshall Plan, forms of assistance and lending, transfor-

mations in the monetary system. It is not only in periods of expansion or 

recovery that axioms multiply. What makes the axiomatic vary, in relation 

to the States, is the distinction and relation between the foreign and domes-

tic markets. There is a multiplication of axioms most notably when an inte-

grated domestic market is being organized to meet the requirements of the 

foreign market. Axioms for the young, for the old, for women, etc. A very 

general pole of the State, "social democracy," can be defined by this ten-

dency to add, invent axioms in relation to spheres of investment and 

sources of profit: the question is not that of freedom and constraint, nor of 

centralism and decentralization, but of the manner in which one masters 

the flows. In this case, they are mastered by the multiplication of directing 

axioms. The opposite tendency is no less a part of capitalism: the tendency 

to withdraw, subtract axioms. One falls back on a very small number of axi-

oms regulating the dominant flows, while the other flows are given a deriv-

ative, consequential status (defined by the "theorems" ensuing from the 

axioms), or are left in an untamed state that does not preclude the brutal 

intervention of State power, quite the contrary. The "totalitarianism" pole 

of the State incarnates this tendency to restrict the number of axioms, and 

operates by the exclusive promotion of the foreign sector: the appeal to for-

eign sources of capital, the rise of industries aimed at the exportation of 

foodstuffs or raw materials, the collapse of the domestic market. The totali-

tarian State iS not a maximum State but rather, following Virilio's formula-

tion, the minimum State of anarcho-capitalism (cf. Chile). At the limit, the 

only axioms that are retained concern the equilibrium of the foreign sector, 

reserve levels and the inflation rate; "the population is no longer a given, it 

has become a consequence." As for untamed evolutions, they appear 

among other places in the variations in the employment level, in the phe-

nomena of exodus from the countryside, shantytown-urbanization, etc.

 

The case of fascism ("national socialism") is distinct from totalitarian-

ism. It coincides with the totalitarian pole in the collapse of the domestic 

market and the reduction in the number of axioms. However, the promo-

tion of the foreign sector does not at all take place through an appeal to for-

 

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eign sources of capital and through export industries, but through a war 

economy, which entails an expansionism foreign to totalitarianism and an 

autonomous fabrication of capital. As for the domestic market, it is effec-

tuated in a specific production of the Ersatz. This means that fascism, too, 

brings a proliferation of axioms, which explains why it has often been com-

pared to a Keynesian economy. Fascism, however, is a tautological or ficti-

tious proliferation, a multiplication by subtraction; this makes it a very 

special case.

62

 

2. Saturation. Can we express the distribution of the two opposite ten-

dencies by saying that the saturation of the system marks the point of inver-

sion? No, for the saturation is itself relative. If Marx demonstrated the 

functioning of capitalism as an axiomatic, it was above all in the famous 

chapter on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Capitalism is indeed an 

axiomatic, because it has no laws but immanent ones. It would like for us to 

believe that it confronts the limits of the Universe, the extreme limit of 

resources and energy. But all it confronts are its own limits (the periodic 

depreciation of existing capital); all it repels or displaces are its own limits 

(the formation of new capital, in new industries with a high profit rate). 

This is the history of oil and nuclear power. And it does both at once: capi-

talism confronts its own limits and simultaneously displaces them, setting 

them down again farther along. It could be said that the totalitarian ten-

dency to restrict the number of axioms corresponds to the confrontation 

with the limits, whereas the social democratic tendency corresponds to the 

displacement of the limits. But one does not come without the other, either 

in two different but coexistent places or in two successive but closely linked 

moments; they always have a hold on each other, or are even contained in 

each other, constituting the same axiomatic. A typical example would be 

present-day Brazil, with its ambiguous alternative "totalitarianism-social 

democracy." As a general rule, the limits are all the more mobile if axioms 

are subtracted in one place but added elsewhere.

 

It would be an error to take a disinterested stance toward struggle on the 

level of the axioms. It is sometimes thought that every axiom, in capitalism 

or in one of its States, constitutes a "recuperation." But this disenchanted 

concept is not a good one. The constant readjustments of the capitalist axi-

omatic, in other words, the additions (the enunciation of new axioms) and 

the withdrawals (the creation of exclusive axioms), are the object of strug-

gles in no way confined to the technocracy. Everywhere, the workers' strug-

gles overspill the framework of the capitalist enterprises, which imply for 

the most part derivative propositions. The struggles bear directly upon the 

axioms that presi de over the State's public spending, or that even concern a 

specific international organization (for example, a multinational corpora-

 

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tion can at will plan the liquidation of a factory inside a country). The 

resulting danger of a worldwide labor bureaucracy or technocracy taking 

charge of these problems can be warded off only to the extent that local 

struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the precise 

point of their insertion in the field of immanence (the potential of the rural 

world in this respect). There is always a fundamental difference between 

living flows and the axioms that subordinate them to centers of control and 

decision making, that make a given segment correspond to them, which 

measure their quanta. But the pressure of the living flows, and of the prob-

lems they pose and impose, must be exerted inside the axiomatic, as much 

in order to fight the totalitarian reductions as to anticipate and precipitate 

the additions, to orient them and prevent their technocratic perversion.

 

3. Models, isomorphy. In principle, all States are isomorphic; in other 

words, they are domains of realization of capital as a function of a sole 

external world market. But the first question is whether isomorphy implies 

a homogeneity or even a homogenization of States. The answer is yes, as 

can be seen in present-day Europe with respect to justice and the police, the 

highway code, the circulation of commodities, production costs, etc. But 

this is true only insofar as there is a tendency toward a single integrated 

domestic market. Otherwise, isomorphy in no way implies homogeneity: 

there is isomorphy, but heterogeneity, between totalitarian and social dem-

ocratic States wherever the mode of production is the same. The general 

rules regarding this are as follows: the consistency, the totality {Vensemble), 
or unity of the axiomatic 
are defined by capital as a "right" or relation of 

production (for the market); the respective independence of the axioms in 

no way contradicts this totality but derives from the divisions or sectors of 

the capitalist mode of production; the isomorphy of the models, with the 

two poles of addition and subtraction, depends on how the domestic and 

foreign markets are distributed in each case.

 

But this is only a first bipolarity, applying to the States that are located 

at the center and are under the capitalist mode of production. A second, 

West-East, bipolarity has been imposed on the States of the center, that of 

the capitalist States and the bureaucratic socialist States. Although this 

new distinction may share certain traits of the first (the so-called socialist 

States being assimilable to the totalitarian States), the problem lies else-

where. The numerous "convergence" theories that attempt to demonstrate 

a certain homogenization of the States of the East and West are not very 

convincing. Even isomorphism is not applicable: there is a real 

heteromorphy, not only because the mode of production is not capitalist, 

but also because the relation of production is not Capital (rather, it is the 

Plan). If the socialist States are nevertheless still models of realization for

 

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the capitalist axiomatic, it is due to the existence of a single external 

world market, which remains the deciding factor here, even above and 

beyond the relations of production from which it results. It can even hap-

pen that the socialist bureaucraticplan(e) takes on a parasitic function in 

relation to the plan(e) of capital, which manifests a greater creativity, of 

the "virus" type.

 

Finally, the third fundamental bipolarity is the center and the periphery 

(North-South). In view of the respective independence of the axioms, we 

can join Samir Amin in saying that the axioms of the periphery differ from 

those of the center.

63

 And here again, the difference and independence of 

the axioms in no way compromise the consistency of the overall axiomatic. 

On the contrary, central capitalism needs the periphery constituted by the 

Third World, where it locates a large part of its most modern industries; it 

does not just invest capital in these industries, but is also furnished with 

capital by them. The issue of the dependence of the Third World States is of 

course an obvious one, but not the most important one (it was bequeathed 

by the old colonialism). It is obvious that having independent axioms has 

never guaranteed the independence of States; rather it ensures an interna-

tional division of labor. The important question, once again, is that of 

isomorphy in relation to the worldwide axiomatic. To a large extent, there 

is isomorphy between the United States and the bloodiest of the South 

American tyrannies (or between France, England, and West Germany and 

certain African States). The center-periphery bipolarity, States of the cen-

ter and States of the Third World, may well exhibit some of the distinguish-

ing traits of the two preceding bipolarities, but it also evades them, raising 

other problems. Throughout a vast portion of the Third World, the general 

relation of production is capital—even throughout the entire Third World, 

in the sense that the socialized sector may utilize that relation, adopting it 

in this case. But the mode of production is not necessarily capitalist, either 

in the so-called archaic or transitional forms, or in the most productive, 

highly industrialized sectors. This indeed represents a third case, included 

in the worldwide axiomatic: when capital acts as the relation of production 

but in noncapitalist modes of production. We may therefore speak of a 

polymorphy of the Third World States in relation to the States of the center. 

And this dimension of the axiomatic is no less necessary than the others; it 

is even much more necessary, for the heteromorphy of the so-called social-

ist States was imposed upon capitalism, which digested it as best it could, 

whereas the polymorphy of the Third World States is partially organized 

by the center, as an axiom providing a substitute for colonization.

 

We are always brought back to the literal question of the models of real-

ization of a worldwide axiomatic: there is in principle an isomorphy of the 

States of the center, a heteromorphy imposed by the bureaucratic socialist

 

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State, and a polymorphy organized by the Third World States. Once again, 

it would be absurd to think that the insertion of popular movements is con-

demned in advance throughout this field of immanence, and to assume 

that there are either "good" States that are democratic, social democratic 

or at the other extreme socialist, or that on the contrary all States are equiv-

alent and homogeneous.

 

4. Power (puissance). Let us suppose that the axiomatic necessarily mar-

shals a power higher than the one it treats, in other words, than that of the 

aggregates serving as its models. This is like a power of the continuum, tied 

to the axiomatic but exceeding it. We immediately recognize this power as 

a power of destruction, of war, a power incarnated in financial, industrial, 

and military technological complexes that are in continuity with one 

another. On the one hand, war clearly follows the same movement as capi-

talism: In the same way as the proportion of constant capital keeps grow-

ing, war becomes increasingly a "war of materiel" in which the human 

being no longer even represents a variable capital of subjection, but is 

instead a pure element of machinic enslavement. On the other hand, and 

this is the main point, the growing importance of constant capital in the 

axiomatic means that the depreciation of existing capital and the forma-

tion of new capital assume a rhythm and scale that necessarily take the 

route of a war machine now incarnated in the complexes: the complexes 

actively contribute to the redistributions of the world necessary for the 

exploitation of maritime and planetary resources. There is a continuous 

"threshold" of power that accompanies in every instance the shifting of the 

axiomatic's limits; it is as though the power of war always supersaturated 

the system's saturation, and was its necessary condition.

 

The classical conflicts among the States of the center (as well as periph-

eral colonization) have been joined, or rather replaced, by two great 

conflictual lines, between West and East and North and South; these lines 

intersect and together cover everything. But the overarmament of the West 

and East not only leaves the reality of local wars entirely intact and gives 

them a new force and new stakes; it not only founds the "apocalyptic" pos-

sibility of a direct confrontation along the two great axes; it also seems that 

the war machine takes on a specific supplementary meaning: industrial, 

political, judicial, etc. It is indeed true that the States, throughout their his-

tory, have repeatedly appropriated the war machine; and it was after the 

war machine was appropriated that war, its preparation and effectuation, 

became the exclusive object of the machine, but as a more or less "limited" 

war. As for the aim, it remained the political aim of the States. The various 

factors that tended to make war a "total war," most notably the fascist fac-

tor, marked the beginning of an inversion of the movement: as though the

 

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States, through the war they waged against one another, had after a long 
period of appropriation reconstituted an autonomous war machine. But 
this unchained or liberated war machine continued to have as its object war 
in action, a now total, unlimited kind of war. The entire fascist economy 
became a war economy, but the war economy still needed total war as its 
object. For this reason, fascist war still fell under Clausewitz's formula, 
"the continuation of politics by other means," even though those other 
means had become exclusive, in other words, the political aim had entered 
into contradiction with the object (hence Virilio's idea that the fascist State 
was a "suicidal" State more than a totalitarian one). It was only after World 
War II that the automatization, then automation of the war machine had 
their true effect. The war machine, the new antagonisms traversing it con-
sidered, no longer had war as its exclusive object but took in charge and as 
its object peace, politics, the world order, in short, the aim. This is where 
the inversion of Clausewitz's formula comes in: it is politics that becomes 
the continuation of war; // is peace that technologically frees the unlimited 
material process of total war. 
War ceases to be the materialization of the war 
machine; the war machine itself becomes materialized war. In this sense, 
there was no longer a need for fascism. The Fascists were only child precur-
sors, and the absolute peace of survival succeeded where total war had 
failed. The Third World War was already upon us. The war machine 
reigned over the entire axiomatic like the power of the continuum that sur-
rounded the "world-economy," and it put all the parts of the universe in 
contact. The world became a smooth space again (sea, air, atmosphere), 
over which reigned a single war machine, even when it opposed its own 
parts. Wars had become a part of peace. More than that, the States no 
longer appropriated the war machine; they reconstituted a war machine of 
which they themselves were only the parts.

 

Of all the authors who have developed an apocalyptic or millenarian 

sense, it is to Paul Virilio's credit to have emphasized these five rigorous 
points: that the war machine finds its new object in the absolute peace of 
terror or deterrence; that it performs a technoscientific "capitalization"; 
that this war machine is terrifying not as a function of a possible war that 
it promises us, as by blackmail, but, on the contrary, as a function of the 
real, very special kind of peace it promotes and has already installed; that 
this war machine no longer needs a qualified enemy but, in conformity 
with the requirements of an axiomatic, operates against the "unspecified 
enemy," domestic or foreign (an individual, group, class, people, event, 
world); that there arose from this a new conception of security as materia-
lized war, as organized insecurity or molecularized, distributed, pro-
grammed catastrophe.

64

 

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5. The included middle. No one has demonstrated more convincingly 

than Braudel that the capitalist axiomatic requires a center and that this 

center was constituted in the North, at the outcome of a long historical 

process: "There can only be a world-economy when the mesh of the net-

work is sufficiently fine, and when exchange is regular and voluminous 

enough to give rise to a central zone."

65

 Many authors believe on this 

account that the North-South, center-periphery axis is more important 

today than the West-East axis, and even principally determines it. This is 

expressed in a common thesis, taken up and developed by Valery Giscard 

d'Estaing: the more equilibrated things become at the center between the 

West and the East, beginning with the equilibrium of overarmament, the 

more they become disequilibrated or "destabilized" from North to South 

and destabilize the central equilibrium. It is clear that in these formulas the 

South is an abstract term designating the Third World or the periphery; 

and even that there are Souths or Third Worlds inside the center. It is also 

clear that this destabilization is not accidental but is a (theorematic) conse-

quence of the axioms of capitalism, principally of the axiom called unequal 
exchange,  
which is indispensable to capitalism's functioning. This for-

mula is therefore the modern version of the oldest formula, which already 

obtained in the archaic empires under different conditions. The more the 

archaic empire overcoded the flows, the more it stimulated decoded flows 

that turned back against it and forced it to change. The more the decoded 

flows enter into a central axiomatic, the more they tend to escape to the 

periphery, to present problems that the axiomatic is incapable of resolving 

or controlling (even by adding special axioms for the periphery).

 

The four principal flows that torment the representatives of the world 

economy, or of the axiomatic, are the flow of matter-energy, the flow of 

population, the flow of food, and the urban flow. The situation seems inex-

tricable because the axiomatic never ceases to create all of these problems, 

while at the same time its axioms, even multiplied, deny it the means of 

resolving them (for example, the circulation and distribution that would 

make it possible to feed the world). Even a social democracy adapted to the 

Third World surely does not undertake to integrate the whole 

poverty-stricken population into the domestic market; what it does, 

rather, is to effect the class rupture that will select the integratable 

elements. And the States of the center deal not only with the Third 

World, each of them has not only an external Third World, but there are 

internal Third Worlds that rise up within them and work them from the 

inside. It could even be said in certain respects that the periphery and the 

center exchange determinations: a deterritorialization of the center, a 

decoding of the center in relation to national and territorial aggregates, 

cause the peripheral formations to become true centers of investment, 

while the central formations

 

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peripheralize. This simultaneously strengthens and relativizes Samir 

Amin's theses. The more the worldwide axiomatic installs high industry 

and highly industrialized agriculture at the periphery, provisionally 

reserving for the center so-called postindustrial activities (automation, 

electronics, information technologies, the conquest of space, 

overarma-ment, etc.), the more it installs peripheral zones of 

underdevelopment inside the center, internal Third Worlds, internal 

Souths. "Masses" of the population are abandoned to erratic work 

(subcontracting, temporary work, or work in the underground economy), 

and their official subsistence is assured only by State allocations and 

wages subject to interruption. It is to the credit of thinkers like Antonio 

Negri to have formulated, on the basis of the exemplary case of Italy, the 

theory of this internal margin, which tends increasingly to merge the 

students with the emarginati.

66

  These phenomena confirm the difference 

between the new machinic enslavement and classical subjection. For 

subjection remained centered on labor and involved a bipolar 

organization, property-labor, bourgeoisie-proletariat. In enslavement and 

the central dominance of constant capital, on the other hand, labor seems 

to have splintered in two directions: intensive surplus labor that no longer 

even takes the route of labor, and extensive labor that has become erratic 

and floating. The totalitarian tendency to abandon axioms of employment 

and the social democratic tendency to multiply statutes can combine 

here, but always in order to effect class ruptures. The opposition between 

the axiomatic and the flows it does not succeed in mastering becomes all 

the more accentuated.

 

6. Minorities. Ours is becoming the age of minorities. We have seen sev-

eral times that minorities are not necessarily defined by the smallness of 

their numbers but rather by becoming or a line of fluctuation, in other 

words, by the gap that separates them from this or that axiom constituting a 

redundant majority ("Ulysses, or today's average, urban European"; or as 

Yann Moulier says, "the national Worker, qualified, male and over 

thirty-five"). A minority can be small in number; but it can also be the 

largest in number, constitute an absolute, indefinite majority. That is the 

situation when authors, even those supposedly on the Left, repeat the great 

capitalist warning cry: in twenty years, "whites" will form only 12 

percent of the world population. . . Thus they are not content to say that the 

majority will change, or has already changed, but say that it is impinged 

upon by a nondenumerable and proliferating minority that threatens to 

destroy the very concept of majority, in other words, the majority as an 

axiom. And the curious concept of nonwhite does not in fact constitute a 

denumerable set. What defines a minority, then, is not the number but the 

relations internal to the number. A minority can be numerous, or even 

infinite; so can a

 

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majority. What distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the rela-

tion internal to the number constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite, 

but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a non-

denumerable set, however many elements it may have. What characterizes 

the nondenumerable is neither the set nor its elements; rather, it is the con-
nection, 
the "and" produced between elements, between sets, and which 

belongs to neither, which eludes them and constitutes a line of flight. The 

axiomatic manipulates only denumerable sets, even infinite ones, whereas 

the minorities constitute "fuzzy," nondenumerable, nonaxiomizable sets, 

in short, "masses," multiplicities of escape and flux.

 

Whether it be the infinite set of the nonwhites of the periphery, or the 

restricted set of the Basques, Corsicans, etc., everywhere we look we see the 

conditions for a worldwide movement: the minorities recreate 

"nationali-tarian" phenomena that the nation-states had been charged with 

controlling and quashing. The bureaucratic socialist sector is certainly not 

spared by these movements, and as Amalrik said, the dissidents are 

nothing, or serve only as pawns in international politics, if they are 

abstracted from the minorities working the USSR. It matters little that the 

minorities are incapable of constituting viable States from the point of 

view of the axiomatic and the market, since in the long run they promote 

compositions that do not pass by way of the capitalist economy any more 

than they do the State-form. The response of the States, or of the axiomatic, 

may obviously be to accord the minorities regional or federal or statutory 

autonomy, in short, to add axioms. But this is not the problem: this 

operation consists only in translating the minorities into denumerable sets 

or subsets, which would enter as elements into the majority, which could 

be counted among the majority. The same applies for a status accorded to 

women, young people, erratic workers, etc. One could even imagine, in 

blood and crisis, a more radical reversal that would make the white world 

the periphery of a yellow world; there would doubtless be an entirely 

different axiomatic. But what we are talking about is something else, 

something even that would not resolve: women, nonmen, as a minority, as 

a nondenumerable flow or set, would receive no adequate expression by 

becoming elements of the majority, in other words, by becoming a 

denumerable finite set. Nonwhites would receive no adequate expression 

by becoming a new yellow or black majority, an infinite denumerable set. 

What is proper to the minority is to assert a power of the nondenumerable, 

even if that minority is composed of a single member. That is the formula 

for multiplicities. Minority as a universal figure, or 

becoming-everybody/everything (devenir tout le monde). Woman: we all 

have to become that, whether we are male or female. Non-white: we all 

have to become that, whether we are white, yellow, or black.

 

Once again, this is not to say that the struggle on the level of the axioms is

 

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without importance; on the contrary, it is determining (at the most diverse 

levels: women's struggle for the vote, for abortion, for jobs; the struggle of 

the regions for autonomy; the struggle of the Third World; the struggle of 

the oppressed masses and minorities in the East or West...). But there is 

also always a sign to indicate that these struggles are the index of another, 

coexistent combat. However modest the demand, it always constitutes a 

point that the axiomatic cannot tolerate: when people demand to formu-

late their problems themselves, and to determine at least the particular 

conditions under which they can receive a more general solution (hold to 

the Particular as an innovative form). It is always astounding to see the 

same story repeated: the modesty of the minorities' initial demands, cou-

pled with the impotence of the axiomatic to resolve the slightest corre-

sponding problem. In short, the struggle around axioms is most important 

when it manifests, itself opens, the gap between two types of propositions, 

propositions of flow and propositions of axioms. The power of the minori-

ties is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt 

within the majority system, nor even to reverse the necessarily tautolog-

ical criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the force of the 

non-denumerable sets, however small they may be, against the 

denumerable sets, even if they are infinite, reversed, or changed, even they 

if imply new axioms or, beyond that, a new axiomatic. The issue is not at all 

anarchy versus organization, nor even centralism versus decentralization, 

but a calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, 

against the axiomatic of denumerable sets. Such a calculus may have its 

own compositions, organizations, even centralizations; nevertheless, it 

proceeds not via the States or the axiomatic process but via a pure 

becoming of minorities.

 

7. Undecidablepropositions. It will be objected that the axiomatic itself 

marshals the power of a nondenumerable infinite set: precisely that of the 

war machine. It seems difficult, however, to use the war machine in the gen-

eral "treatment" of minorities without triggering the absolute war it is sup-

posed to ward off. We have seen the war machine institute quantitative and 

qualitative processes, miniaturizations, and adaptations that enable it to 

graduate its attacks or counterattacks, each time as a function of the nature 

of the "unspecified enemy" (individuals, groups, peoples.. .). But under 

these conditions, the capitalist axiomatic continually produces and repro-

duces what the war machine tries to exterminate. Even the organization of 

famine multiplies the starving as much as it kills them. Even the organiza-

tion of camps,  an area where the socialist sector has dreadfully distin-

guished itself, does not assure the radical solution of which power dreams. 

The extermination of a minority engenders a minority of that minority.

 

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However relentless the killing, it is relatively difficult to liquidate a people 

or a group, even in the Third World, once it has enough connections with 

elements of the axiomatic. In still other respects, it can be predicted that 

the impending problems of the economy, which will consist in reforming 

capital in relation to new resources (undersea oil, metallic nodules, food-

stuffs), will require not only a redistribution of the world that will mobilize 

the worldwide war machine and train its parts on the new objectives; we 

will also probably see the formation or re-formation of minoritarian aggre-

gates, in relation to the affected regions.

 

Generally speaking, minorities do not receive a better solution of their 

problem by integration, even with axioms, statutes, autonomies, inde-

pendences. Their tactics necessarily go that route. But if they are revolu-

tionary, it is because they carry within them a deeper movement that 

challenges the worldwide axiomatic. The power of minority, of particu-

larity, finds its figure or its universal consciousness in the proletariat. But 

as long as the working class defines itself by an acquired status, or even by 

a theoretically conquered State, it appears only as "capital," a part of cap-

ital (variable capital), and does not leave the plan(e) of capital. At best, the 

plan(e) becomes bureaucratic. On the other hand, it is by leaving the 

plan(e) of capital, and never ceasing to leave it, that a mass becomes 

increasingly revolutionary and destroys the dominant equilibrium of the 

denumerable sets.

67

 It is hard to see what an Amazon-State would be, a 

women's State, or a State of erratic workers, a State of the "refusal" of 

work. If minorities do not constitute viable States culturally, politically, 

economically, it is because the State-form is not appropriate to them, nor 

the axiomatic of capital, nor the corresponding culture. We have often 

seen capitalism maintain and organize inviable States, according to its 

needs, and for the precise purpose of crushing minorities. The minorities 

issue is instead that of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of 

constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine 

by other means.

 

If the two solutions of extermination and integration hardly seem possi-

ble, it is due to the deepest law of capitalism: it continually sets and then 

repels its own limits, but in so doing gives rise to numerous flows in all 

directions that escape its axiomatic. At the same time as capitalism is effec-
tuated in the denumerable sets serving as its models, it necessarily consti-
tutes nondenumerable sets that cut across and disrupt those models. 
It does 

not effect the "conjugation" of the deterritorialized and decoded flows 

without those flows forging farther ahead; without their escaping both the 

axiomatic that conjugates them and the models that reterritorialize them; 

without their tending to enter into "connections" that delineate a new 

Land; without their constituting a war machine whose aim is neither the

 

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war of extermination nor the peace of generalized terror, but revolutionary 

movement (the connection of flows, the composition of nondenumerable 

aggregates, the becoming-minoritarian of everybody/everything). This is 

not a dispersion or a fragmentation: we are instead back at the opposition 
between, on the one hand, a plane of consistency and, on the other, the plane 
of organization and development of capital and the bureaucratic socialist 
plane. 
There is in each case a constructivism, a "diagrammatism," operat-

ing by the determination of the conditions of the problem and by transver-

sal links between problems: it opposes both the automation of the capitalist 

axioms and bureaucratic programming. From this standpoint, when we 

talk about "undecidable propositions," we are not referring to the uncer-

tainty of the results, which is necessarily a part of every system. We are 

referring, on the contrary, to the coexistence and inseparability of that 

which the system conjugates, and that which never ceases to escape it fol-

lowing lines of flight that are themselves connectable. The undecidable is 

the germ and locus par excellence of revolutionary decisions. Some people 

invoke the high technology of the world system of enslavement; but even, 

and especially, this machinic enslavement abounds in undecidable 

propositions and movements that, far from belonging to a domain of 

knowledge reserved for sworn specialists, provides so many weapons for 

the becoming of everybody/everything, becoming-radio, 

becoming-electronic, becoming-molecular.. ,

68

 Every struggle is a function 

of all of these undecidable propositions and constructs revolutionary 
connections 
in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic.

 

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14. 1440: The Smooth and the Striated

 

 

Quilt

 

Smooth space and striated space—nomad space and sedentary space—the 
space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the 
State apparatus—are not of the same nature. No sooner do we note a sim-
ple opposition between the two kinds of space than we must indicate a 
much more complex difference by virtue of which the successive terms of 
the oppositions fail to coincide entirely. And no sooner have we done that 
than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mix-
ture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a stri-
ated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a 
smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even the desert; in the second,

 

474

 

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the desert gains and grows; and the two can happen simultaneously. But the 

de facto mixes do not preclude a de jure, or abstract, distinction between 

the two spaces. That there is such a distinction is what accounts for the fact 

that the two spaces do not communicate with each other in the same way: it 

is the de jure distinction that determines the forms assumed by a given de 

facto mix and the direction or meaning of the mix (is a smooth space cap-

tured, enveloped by a striated space, or does a striated space dissolve into a 

smooth space, allow a smooth space to develop?). This raises a number of 

simultaneous questions: the simple oppositions between the two spaces; 

the complex differences; the de facto mixes, and the passages from one to 

another; the principles of the mixture, which are not at all symmetrical, 

sometimes causing a passage from the smooth to the striated, sometimes 

from the striated to the smooth, according to entirely different move-

ments. We must therefore envision a certain number of models, which 

would be like various aspects of the two spaces and the relations between 

them.

 

The Technological Model. A fabric presents in principle a certain number 

of characteristics that permit us to define it as a striated space. First, it is 

constituted by two kinds of parallel elements; in the simplest case, there are 

vertical and horizontal elements, and the two intertwine, intersect perpen-

dicularly. Second, the two kinds of elements have different functions; one 

is fixed, the other mobile, passing above and beneath the fixed. 

Leroi-Gourhan has analyzed this particular figure of "supple solids" in 

basketry and weaving: stake and thread, warp and woof.' Third, a striated 

space of this kind is necessarily delimited, closed on at least one side: the 

fabric can be infinite in length but not in width, which is determined by 

the frame of the warp; the necessity of a back and forth motion implies a 

closed space (circular or cylindrical figures are themselves closed). 

Finally, a space of this kind seems necessarily to have a top and a bottom; 

even when the warp yarn and woof yarn are exactly the same in nature, 

number, and density, weaving reconstitutes a bottom by placing the knots 

on one side. Was it not these characteristics that enabled Plato to use the 

model of weaving as the paradigm for "royal science," in other words, the 

art of governing people or operating the State apparatus?

 

Felt is a supple solid product that proceeds altogether differently, as an 

anti-fabric. It implies no separation of threads, no intertwining, only an 

entanglement of fibers obtained by fulling (for example, by rolling the 

block of fibers back and forth). What becomes entangled are the 

microscales of the fibers. An aggregate of intrication of this kind is in no 

way homogeneous: it is nevertheless smooth, and contrasts point by point 

with the space of fabric (it is in principle infinite, open, and unlimited in

 

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every direction; it has neither top nor bottom nor center; it does not assign 

fixed and mobile elements but rather distributes a continuous variation). 

Even the technologists who express grave doubts about the nomads' pow-

ers of innovation at least give them credit for felt: a splendid insulator, an 

ingenious invention, the raw material for tents, clothes, and armor among 

the Turco-Mongols. Of course, the nomads of Africa and the Maghreb 

instead treat wool as a fabric. Although it might entail displacing the oppo-

sition, do we not detect two very different conceptions or even practices of 

weaving, the distinction between which would be something like the dis-

tinction between fabric as a whole and felt? For among sedentaries, 

clothes-fabric and tapestry-fabric tend to annex the body and exterior 

space, respectively, to the immobile house: fabric integrates the body and 

the outside into a closed space. On the other hand, the weaving of the 

nomad indexes clothing and the house itself to the space of the outside, to 

the open smooth space in which the body moves.

 

There are many interfacings, mixes between felt and fabric. Can we not 

displace the opposition yet again? In knitting, for example, the needles pro-

duce a striated space; one of them plays the role of the warp, the other of the 

woof, but by turns. Crochet, on the other hand, draws an open space in all 

directions, a space that is prolongable in all directions—but still has a cen-

ter. A more significant distinction would be between embroidery, with its 

central theme or motif, and patchwork, with its piece-by-piece construc-

tion, its infinite, successive additions of fabric. Of course, embroidery's 

variables and constants, fixed and mobile elements, may be of extraordi-

nary complexity. Patchwork, for its part, may display equivalents to 

themes, symmetries, and resonance that approximate it to embroidery. 

But the fact remains that its space is not at all constituted in the same way: 

there is no center; its basic motif ("block") is composed of a single element; 

the recurrence of this element frees uniquely rhythmic values distinct from 

the harmonies of embroidery (in particular, in "crazy" patchwork, which 

fits together pieces of varying size, shape, and color, and plays on the tex-
ture 
of the fabrics). "She had been working on it for fifteen years, carrying 

about with her a shapeless bag of dingy, threadbare brocade containing 

odds and ends of colored fabric in all possible shapes. She could never 

bring herself to trim them to any pattern; so she shifted and fitted and 

mused and fitted and shifted them like pieces of a patient puzzle-picture, 

trying to fit them to a pattern or create a pattern out of them without using 

her scissors, smoothing her colored scraps with flaccid, putty-colored fin-

gers."

2

 An amorphous collection of juxtaposed pieces that can be joined 

together in an infinite number of ways: we see that patchwork is literally a 

Riemannian space, or vice versa. That is why very special work groups 

were formed for patchwork fabrication (the importance of the quilting bee

 

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THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 477

 

in America, and its role from the standpoint of a women's collectivity). The 

smooth space of patchwork is adequate to demonstrate that "smooth" does 

not mean homogeneous, quite the contrary: it is an amorphous, nonformal 

space prefiguring op art.

 

The story of the quilt is particularly interesting in this connection. A 

quilt comprises two layers of fabric stitched together, often with a filler in 

between. Thus it is possible for there to be no top or bottom. If we follow 

the history of the quilt over a short migration sequence (the settlers who 

left Europe for the New World), we see that there is a shift from a formula 

dominated by embroidery (so-called "plain" quilts) to a patchwork for-

mula ("applique quilts," and above all "pieced quilts"). The first settlers 

of the seventeenth century brought with them plain quilts, embroidered 

and striated spaces of extreme beauty. But toward the end of the century 

patchwork technique was developed more and more, at first due to the 

scarcity of textiles (leftover fabric, pieces salvaged from used clothes, 

remnants taken from the "scrap bag"), and later due to the popularity of 

Indian chintz. It is as though a smooth space emanated, sprang from a 

striated space, but not without a correlation between the two, a recapitu-

lation of one in the other, a furtherance of one through the other. Yet the 

complex difference persists. Patchwork, in conformity with migration, 

whose degree of affinity with nomadism it shares, is not only named after 

trajectories, but "represents" trajectories, becomes inseparable from 

speed or movement in an open space.

3

 

The Musical Model. Pierre Boulez was the first to develop a set of simple 

oppositions and complex differences, as well as reciprocal nonsymmetrical 

correlations, between smooth and striated space. He created these con-

cepts and words in the field of music, defining them on several levels pre-

cisely in order to account for the abstract distinction at the same time as the 

concrete mixes. In the simplest terms, Boulez says that in a smooth 

space-time one occupies without counting, whereas in a striated 

space-time one counts in order to occupy. He makes palpable or 

perceptible the difference between nonmetric and metric multiplicities, 

directional and dimensional spaces. He renders them sonorous or 

musical. Undoubtedly, his personal work is composed of these relations, 

created or recreated musically.

4

 

At a second level, it can be said that space is susceptible to two kinds of 

breaks: one is defined by a standard, whereas the other is irregular and 

undetermined, and can be made wherever one wishes to place it. At yet 

another level, it can be said that frequencies can be distributed either in the 

intervals between breaks, or statistically without breaks. In the first case, 

the principle behind the distribution of breaks and intervals is called a 

"module"; it may be constant and fixed (a straight striated space), or

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

 

regularly or irregularly variable (curved striated spaces, termed focalized if 

the variation of the module is regular, nonfocalized if it is irregular). When 

there is no module, the distribution of frequencies is without break: it is 

"statistical," however small the segment of space may be; it still has two 

aspects, however, depending on whether the distribution is equal 

(nondirected smooth space), or more or less rare or dense (directed smooth 

space). Can we say that in the kind of smooth space that is without break or 

module there is no interval? Or, on the contrary, has everything become 

interval, intermezzo? The smooth is a nomos, whereas the striated always 

has a logos, the octave, for example. Boulez is concerned with the commu-

nication between the two kinds of space, their alternations and superposi-

tions: how "a strongly directed smooth space tends to meld with a striated 

space," how "a striated space in which the statistical distribution of the 

pitches used is in fact equal tends to meld with a smooth space";

5

 how the 

octave can be replaced by "non-octave-forming scales" that reproduce 

themselves through a principle of spiraling; how "texture" can be crafted in 

such a way as to lose fixed and homogeneous values, becoming a support 

for slips in tempo, displacements of intervals, and son art transformations 

comparable to the transformations of op art.

 

Returning to the simple opposition, the striated is that which inter-

twines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of 

distinct forms, and organizes horizontal melodic lines and vertical har-

monic planes. The smooth is the continuous variation, continuous devel-

opment of form; it is the fusion of harmony and melody in favor of the 

production of properly rythmic values, the pure act of the drawing of a 

diagonal across the vertical and the horizontal.

 

The Maritime Model. Of course, there are points, lines, and surfaces in 

striated space as well as in smooth space (there are also volumes, but we will 

leave this question aside for the time being). In striated space, lines or tra-

jectories tend to be subordinated to points: one goes from one point to 

another. In the smooth, it is the opposite: the points are subordinated to the 

trajectory. This was already the case among the nomads for the 

clothes-tent-space vector of the outside. The dwelling is subordinated to 

the journey; inside space conforms to outside space: tent, igloo, boat. 

There are stops and trajectories in both the smooth and the striated. But 

in smooth space, the stop follows from the trajectory; once again, the 

interval takes all, the interval is substance (forming the basis for rhythmic 

values).

6

 

In smooth space, the line is therefore a vector, a direction and not a 

dimension or metric determination. It is a space constructed by local oper-

ations involving changes in direction. These changes in direction may be 

due to the nature of the journey itself, as with the nomads of the archipela-

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED D 479

 

goes (a case of "directed" smooth space); but it is more likely to be due to 

the variability of the goal or point to be attained, as with the nomads of the 

desert who head toward local, temporary vegetation (a "nondirected" 

smooth space). Directed or not, and especially in the latter case, smooth 

space is directional rather than dimensional or metric. Smooth space is 

filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed and perceived 

things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties. It is haptic rather 

than optical perception. Whereas in the striated forms organize a matter, 

in the smooth materials signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is 

an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures 

and properties. Intense Spatium  instead of Extensio.  A Body without 

Organs instead of an organism and organization. Perception in it is based 

on symptoms and evaluations rather than measures and properties. That is 

why smooth space is occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and 

sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice.

7

 The creaking 

of ice and the song of the sands. Striated space, on the contrary, is can-

opied by the sky as measure and by the measurable visual qualities deriv-

ing from it.

 

This is where the very special problem of the sea enters in. For the sea is a 

smooth space par excellence, and yet was the first to encounter the 

demands of increasingly strict striation. The problem did not arise in prox-

imity to land. On the contrary, the striation of the sea was a result of naviga-

tion on the open water. Maritime space was striated as a function of two 

astronomical and geographical gains: bearings, obtained by a set of calcula-

tions based on exact observation of the stars and the sun; and the map, 

which intertwines meridians and parallels, longitudes and latitudes, plot-

ting regions known and unknown onto a grid (like a Mendeleyev table). 

Must we accept the Portuguese argument and assign 1440 as the turning 

point that marked the first decisive striation, and set the stage for the great 

discoveries? Rather, we will follow Pierre Chaunu when he speaks of an 

extended confrontation at sea between the smooth and the striated during 

the course of which the striated progressively took hold.

8

 For before longi-

tude lines had been plotted, a very late development, there existed a com-

plex and empirical nomadic system of navigation based on the wind and 

noise, the colors and sounds of the seas; then came a directional, 

preastronomical or already astronomical, system of navigation employing 

only latitude, in which there was no possibility of "taking one's bearings," 

and which had only portolanos lacking "translatable generalization" 

instead of true maps; finally, improvements upon this primitive astronom-

ical navigation were made under the very special conditions of the lati-

tudes of the Indian Ocean, then of the elliptical circuits of the Atlantic 

(straight and curved spaces).

9

 It is as if the sea were not only the archetype

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

 

of all smooth spaces but the first to undergo a gradual striation gridding it 

in one place, then another, on this side and that. The commercial cities par-

ticipated in this striation, and were often innovators; but only the States 

were capable of carrying it to completion, of raising it to the global level of a 

"politics of science."

10

 A dimensionality that subordinated directionality, 

or superimposed itself upon it, became increasingly entrenched.

 

This is undoubtedly why the sea, the archetype of smooth space, was 

also the archetype of all striations of smooth space: the striation of the 

desert, the air, the stratosphere (prompting Virilio to speak of a "vertical 

coastline," as a change in direction). It was at sea that smooth space was 

first subjugated and a model found for the laying-out and imposition of 

striated space, a model later put to use elsewhere. This does not contradict 

Virilio's other hypothesis: in the aftermath of striation, the sea reimparts a 

kind of smooth space, occupied first by the "fleet in being," then by the per-

petual motion of the strategic submarine, which outflanks all gridding and 

invents a neonomadism in the service of a war machine still more disturb-

ing than the States, which reconstitute it at the limit of their striations. The 

sea, then the air and the stratosphere, become smooth spaces again, but, in 

the strangest of reversals, it is for the purpose of controlling striated space 

more completely.

11

 The smooth always possesses a greater power of 

deterritorialization than the striated. When examining the new profes-

sions, or new classes even, how can one fail to mention the military techni-

cians who stare into screens night and day and live for long stretches in 

strategic submarines (in the future it will be on satellites), and the apoca-

lyptic eyes and ears they have fashioned for themselves, which can barely 

distinguish any more between a natural phenomenon, a swarm of locusts, 

and an "enemy" attack originating at any given point? All of this serves as a 

reminder that the smooth itself can be drawn and occupied by diabolical 

powers of organization; value judgments aside, this demonstrates above all 

that there exist two nonsymmetrical movements, one of which striates the 

smooth, and one of which reimparts smooth space on the basis of the stri-

ated. (Do not new smooth spaces, or holey spaces, arise as parries even in 

relation to the smooth space of a worldwide organization? Virilio invokes 

the beginnings of subterranean habitation in the "mineral layer," which 

can take on very diverse values.)

 

Let us return to the simple opposition between the smooth and the stri-

ated since we are not yet at the point where we can consider the dis-

symmetrical and concrete mixes. The smooth and the striated are 

distinguished first of all by an inverse relation between the point and the 

line (in the case of the striated, the line is between two points, while in the 

smooth, the point is between two lines); and second, by the nature of the 

line (smooth-directional, open intervals; dimensional-striated, closed

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 481

 

intervals). Finally, there is a third difference, concerning the surface or 

space. In striated space, one closes off a surface and "allocates" it according 

to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one "distributes" 

oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of 

one's crossings (logos and nomos).

I2

 As simple as this opposition is, it is not 

easy to place it. We cannot content ourselves with establishing an immedi-

ate opposition between the smooth ground of the nomadic animal raiser 

and the striated land of the sedentary cultivator. It is evident that the peas-

ant, even the sedentary peasant, participates fully in the space of the wind, 

the space of tactile and sonorous qualities. When the ancient Greeks speak 

of the open space of the nomos—nondelimited, unpartitioned; the 

pre-urban countryside; mountainside, plateau, steppe—they oppose it not 

to cultivation, which may actually be part of it, but to the polis, the city, 

the town. When Ibn Khaldun speaks oibadiya,  bedouinism, the term 

covers cultivators as well as nomadic animal raisers: he contrasts it to 
hadara, or "city life." This clarification is certainly important, but it does 

not change much. For from the most ancient of times, from Neolithic and 

even Paleolithic times, it is the town that invents agriculture: it is through the 

actions of the town that the farmers and their striated space are superposed 

upon the cultivators operating in a still smooth space (the transhumant 

cultivator, half-sedentary or already completely sedentary). So on this 

level we reencounter the simple opposition we began by challenging, 

between farmers and nomads, striated land and smooth ground: but only 

after a detour through the town as a force of striation. Now not only the 

sea, desert, steppe, and air are the sites of a contest between the smooth 

and the striated, but the earth itself, depending on whether there is 

cultivation in nomos-space or agriculture in city-space. Must we not say 

the same of the city itself? In contrast to the sea, the city is the striated space 

par excellence; the sea is a smooth space fundamentally open to striation, 

and the city is the force of striation that reimparts smooth space, puts it 

back into operation everywhere, on earth and in the other elements, outside 

but also inside itself. The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only 

those of worldwide organization, but also of a counterattack combining 

the smooth and the holey and turning back against the town: sprawling, 

temporary, shifting shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap 

metal and fabric, patchwork, to which the striations of money, work, or 

housing are no longer even relevant. An explosive misery secreted by the 

city, and corresponding to Thorn's mathematical formula: "retroactive 

smoothing."

13

 Condensed force, the potential for counterattack?

 

In each instance, then, the simple opposition "smooth-striated" gives 

rise to far more difficult complications, alternations, and superpositions. 

But these complications basically confirm the distinction, precisely

 

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482 □ 1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

 

because they bring dissymmetrical movements into play. For now, it suf-

fices to say that there are two kinds of voyage, distinguished by the respec-

tive role of the point, line, and space. Goethe travel and Kleist travel? 

French travel and English (or American) travel? Tree travel and rhizome 

travel? But nothing completely coincides, and everything intermingles, or 

crosses over. This is because the differences are not objective: it is possible 

to live striated on the deserts, steppes, or seas; it is possible to live smooth 

even in the cities, to be an urban nomad (for example, a stroll taken by 

Henry Miller in Clichy or Brooklyn is a nomadic transit in smooth space; 

he makes the city disgorge a patchwork, differentials of speed, delays and 

accelerations, changes in orientation, continuous variations ... The beat-

niks owe much to Miller, but they changed direction again, they put the 

space outside the cities to new use). Fitzgerald said it long ago: it is not a 

question of taking off for the South Seas, that is not what determines a voy-

age. There are not only strange voyages in the city but voyages in place: we 

are not thinking of drug users, whose experience is too ambiguous, but of 

true nomads. We can say of the nomads, following Toynbee's suggestion: 
they do not move. They are nomads by dint of not moving, not migrating, of 

holding a smooth space that they refuse to leave, that they leave only in 

order to conquer and die. Voyage in place: that is the name of all intensities, 

even if they also develop in extension. To think is to voyage; earlier we tried 

to establish a theo-noological model of smooth and striated spaces. In 

short, what distinguishes the two kinds of voyages is neither a measurable 

quantity of movement, nor something that would be only in the mind, but 

the mode of spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for space. 

Voyage smoothly or in striation, and think the same way... But there are 

always passages from one to the other, transformations of one within the 

other, reversals. In his film, Kings of the Road, Wenders intersects and 

superposes the paths of two characters; one of them takes a still educa-

tional, memorial, cultural, Goethean journey that is thoroughly striated, 

whereas the other has already conquered smooth space, and only experi-

ments, induces amnesia in the German "desert." But oddly enough, it is the 

former who opens space for himself and performs a kind of retroactive 

smoothing, whereas striae reform around the latter, closing his space again. 

Voyaging smoothly is a becoming, and a difficult, uncertain becoming at 

that. It is not a question of returning to preastronomical navigation, nor to 

the ancient nomads. The confrontation between the smooth and the stri-

ated, the passages, alternations and superpositions, are under way today, 

running in the most varied directions.

 

The Mathematical Model. It was a decisive event when the mathematician 

Riemann uprooted the multiple from its predicate state and made it a

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 483

 

noun, "multiplicity." It marked the end of dialectics and the beginning of a 

typology and topology of multiplicities. Each multiplicity was defined by 

determinations; sometimes the determinations were independent of the 

situation, and sometimes they depended upon it. For example, the magni-

tude of a vertical line between two points can be compared to the magni-

tude of a horizontal line between two other points: it is clear that the 

multiplicity in this case is metric, that it allows itself to be striated, and that 

its determinations are magnitudes. On the other hand, two sounds of equal 

pitch and different intensity cannot be compared to two sounds of equal 

intensity and different pitch; in this case, two determinations can be com-

pared only "if one is a part of the other and if we restrict ourselves to the 

judgment that the latter is smaller than the former, without being able to 

say by how much."

14

 Multiplicities of this second kind are not metric and 

allow themselves to be striated and measured only by indirect means, 

which they always resist. They are anexact yet rigorous. Meinong and 

Russell opposed the notion of distance to that of magnitude.

15

 Distances 

are not, strictly speaking, indivisible: they can be divided precisely in cases 

where the situation of one determination makes it part of another. But 

unlike magnitudes, they cannot divide without changing in nature each 
time.  
An intensity, for example, is not composed of addable and 

displace-able magnitudes: a temperature is not the sum of two smaller 

temperatures, a speed is not the sum of two smaller speeds. Since each 

intensity is itself a difference, it divides according to an order in which each 

term of the division differs in nature from the others. Distance is therefore 

a set of ordered differences, in other words, differences that are enveloped 

in one another in such a way that it is possible to judge which is larger or 

smaller, but not their exact magnitudes. For example, one can divide 

movement into the gallop, trot, and walk, but in such a way that what is 

divided changes in nature at each moment of the division, without any one 

of these moments entering into the composition of any other. Therefore 

these multiplicities of "distance" are inseparable from a process of 

continuous variation, whereas multiplicities of "magnitude" distribute 

constants and variables.

 

That is why we consider Bergson to be of major importance (much more 

so than Husserl, or even Meinong or Russell) in the development of the the-

ory of multiplicities. Beginning in Time and Free Will, he presents dura-

tion as a type of multiplicity opposed to metric multiplicity or the 

multiplicity of magnitude. Duration is in no way indivisible, but is that 

which cannot be divided without changing in nature at each division 

(Achilles' running is not divided into steps, his steps do not compose it in 

the manner of magnitudes).

16

 On the other hand, in a multiplicity such as 

homogeneous extension, the division can be carried as far as one likes

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

 

without changing anything in the constant object; or the magnitudes can 

vary with no other result than an increase or a decrease in the amount of 

space they striate. Bergson thus brought to light "two very different kinds 

of multiplicity," one qualitative and fusional, continuous, the other 

numerical and homogeneous, discrete. It will be noted that matter  goes 

back and forth between the two; sometimes it is already enveloped in quali-

tative multiplicity, sometimes already developed in a metric "schema" 

that draws it outside of itself. The confrontation between Bergson and 

Einstein on the topic of Relativity is incomprehensible if one fails to place 

it in the context of the basic theory of Riemannian multiplicities, as modi-

fied by Bergson.

 

We have on numerous occasions encountered all kinds of differences 

between two types of multiplicities: metric and nonmetric; extensive and 

qualitative; centered and acentered; arborescent and rhizomatic; numeri-

cal and flat; dimensional and directional; of masses and of packs; of magni-

tude and of distance; of breaks and of frequency; striated and smooth. Not 

only is that which peoples a smooth space a multiplicity that changes in 

nature when it divides—such as tribes in the desert: constantly modified 

distances, packs that are always undergoing metamorphosis—but smooth 

space itself, desert, steppe, sea, or ice, is a multiplicity of this type, 

non-metric, acentered, directional, etc. Now it might be thought that the 

Number would belong exclusively to the other multiplicities, that it 

would accord them the scientific status nonmetric multiplicities lack. But 

this is only partially true. It is true that the number is the correlate of the 

metric: magnitudes can striate space only by reference to numbers, and 

conversely, numbers are used to express increasingly complex relations 

between magnitudes, thus giving rise to ideal spaces reinforcing the 

striation and making it coextensive with all of matter. There is therefore a 

correlation within metric multiplicities between geometry and arithmetic, 

geometry and algebra, which is constitutive of major science (the most 

profound authors in this respect are those who have seen that the number, 

even in its simplest forms, is exclusively cardinal in character, and the unit 

exclusively divisible).

17

 It could be said on the other hand that nonmetric 

multiplicities or the multiplicities of smooth space pertain only to a minor 

geometry that is purely operative and qualitative, in which calculation is 

necessarily very limited, and the local operations of which are not even 

capable of general translatability or a homogeneous system of location. 

Yet this "inferiority" is only apparent; for the independence of this nearly 

illiterate, ametric geometry is what makes possible the independence of the 

number, the subsequent function of which is to measure magnitudes in 

striated space (or to striate). The number distributes itself in smooth 

space; it does not divide without changing nature each time, without 

changing units, each of which

 

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THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 485

 

represents a distance and not a magnitude. The ordinal, directional, no-

madic, articulated number, the numbering number, pertains to smooth 

space, just as the numbered number pertains to striated space. So we may 

say of every multiplicity that it is already a number, and still a unit. But the 

number and the unit, and even the way in which the unit divides, are differ-

ent in each case. Minor science is continually enriching major science, 

communicating its intuitions to it, its way of proceeding, its itinerancy, its 

sense of and taste for matter, singularity, variation, intuitionist geometry 

and the numbering number.

 

But so far we have only considered the first aspect of smooth and 

nonmetric multiplicities, as opposed to metric multiplicities: how the situ-

ation of one determination can make it part of another without our being 

able either to assign that situation an exact magnitude or common unit, or 

to discount it. This is the enveloping or enveloped character of smooth 

space. But there is a second, more important, aspect: when the situation of 

the two determinations precludes their comparison. As we know, this is the 

case for Riemannian spaces, or rather, Riemannian patches of space: 

"Riemann spaces are devoid of any kind of homogeneity. Each is charac-

terized by the form of the expression that defines the square of the distance 

between two infinitely proximate points.... It follows that two neighbor-

ing observers in a Riemann space can locate the points in their immediate 

vicinity but cannot locate their spaces in relation to each other without a 

new convention. Each vicinity is therefore like a shred of Euclidean space, 
but the linkage between one vicinity and the next is not defined and can be 
effected in an infinite number of ways. Riemann space at its most general 
thus presents itself as an amorphous collection of pieces that are juxtaposed 
but not attached to each other." 
It is possible to define this multiplicity 

without any reference to a metrical system, in terms of the conditions of 

frequency, or rather accumulation, of a set of vicinities; these conditions 

are entirely different from those determining metric spaces and their 

breaks (even though a relation between the two kinds of space necessarily 

results).

18

 In short, if we follow Lautman's fine description, Riemannian 

space is pure patchwork. It has connections, or tactile relations. It has 

rhythmic values not found elsewhere, even though they can be translated 

into a metric space. Heterogeneous, in continuous variation, it is a smooth 

space, insofar as smooth space is amorphous and not homogeneous. We 

can thus define two positive characteristics of smooth space in general: 

when there are determinations that are part of one another and pertain to 

enveloped distances or ordered differences, independent of magnitude; 

when, independent of metrics, determinations arise that cannot be part of 

one another but are connected by processes of frequency or accumulation. 

These are the two aspects of the nomos of smooth space.

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

 

We are always, however, brought back to a dissymmetrical necessity to 

cross from the smooth to the striated, and from the striated to the smooth. 

If it is true that itinerant geometry and the nomadic number of smooth 

spaces are a constant inspiration to royal science and striated space, con-

versely, the metrics of striated spaces {metrori)  is indispensable for the 

translation of the strange data of a smooth multiplicity. Translating is not a 

simple act: it is not enough to substitute the space traversed for the move-

ment; a series of rich and complex operations is necessary (Bergson was the 

first to make this point). Neither is translating a secondary act. It is an oper-

ation that undoubtedly consists in subjugating, overcoding, metricizing 

smooth space, in neutralizing it, but also in giving it a milieu of propaga-

tion, extension, refraction, renewal, and impulse without which it would 

perhaps die of its own accord: like a mask without which it could neither 

breathe nor find a general form of expression. Major science has a perpet-

ual need for the inspiration of the minor; but the minor would be nothing if 

it did not confront and conform to the highest scientific requirements. Let 

us take just two examples of the richness and necessity of translations, 

which include as many opportunities for openings as risks of closure or 

stoppage: first, the complexity of the means by which one translates inten-

sities into extensive quantities, or more generally, multiplicities of dis-

tance into systems of magnitudes that measure and striate them (the role of 

logarithms in this connection); second, and more important, the delicacy 

and complexity of the means by which Riemannian patches of smooth 

space receive a Euclidean conjunction (the role of the parallelism of vectors 

in striating the infinitesimal).

19

 The mode of connection proper to patches 

of Riemannian space ("accumulation") is not to be confused with the 

Euclidean conjunction of Riemann space ("parallelism"). Yet the two are 

linked and give each other impetus. Nothing is ever done with: smooth 

space allows itself to be striated, and striated space reimparts a smooth 

space, with potentially very different values, scope, and signs. Perhaps we 

must say that all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming 

occurs in smooth space.

 

Is it possible to give a very general mathematical definition of smooth 

spaces? Benoit Mandelbrot's "fractals" seem to be on that path. Fractals 

are aggregates whose number of dimensions is fractional rather than 

whole, or else whole but with continuous variation in direction. An exam-

ple would be a line segment whose central third is replaced by the angle of 

an equilateral triangle; the operation is repeated for the four resulting seg-

ments, and so on ad infinitum, following a relation of similarity—such a 

segment would constitute an infinite line or curve with a dimension 

greater than one, but less than a surface (= 2). Similar results can be

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 487

 

 

 

Von Koch's curve: more than a line, less 
than a surface. The middle third of 
segment  AE  (1) is removed and 
replaced with the traingle BCD (2). In 
(3), this operation is repeated sepa-
rately for each of the segments/l/?, AC, 
CD, and DE. 
This yields an angled line 
of equal segments (4), and so on, ad 
infinitum. The end result is a "curve" 
composed of an infinite number of 
angled points that preclude any tan-
gent being drawn to any of their 
points. The length of the curve is infi-
nite and its dimension is higher than 
one: it represents a space of 1.261859 
dimensions (log 4/log 3 exactly).

 

Sierpensky's sponge: more than a surface, less 
than a volume. The law according to which this 
cube was hollowed can be understood intui-
tively at a glance. Each square hole is sur-
rounded by eight holes a third its size. These 
holes are in turn surrounded by eight holes, also 
a third their size. And so on, endlessly. The illus-
trator could not represent the infinity of holes 
of decreasing size beyond the fourth degree, but 
it is plain to see that this cube is in the end infi-
nitely hollow. Its total volume approaches zero, 
while the total lateral surface of the hollowings 
infinitely grows. This space has a dimension of 
2.7268. It therefore lies between a surface (with 
a dimension of 2) and a volume (with a dimen-
sion of 3). "Sierpinsky's rug" is one face of this 
cube; the hollowings are then squares and the 
dimension of the "surface" is 1.2618. From 
Studies in Geometry by Leonard M. 
Blu-menthal and Karl Menger. Copyright © 
1970 W. H. Freeman and Company. 
Reprinted with permission.

 

Concerning Benoit Mandelbrot's "Fractals"

 

obtained by making holes, by cutting, "windows" into a circle, instead of 

adding "points" to a triangle; likewise, a cube into which holes are drilled 

according to the principle of similarity becomes less than a volume but 

more than a surface (this is the mathematical presentation of the affinity 

between a free space and a holey space). In still other forms, Brownian 

motion, turbulence, and the sky are "fractals" of this kind.

20

 Perhaps this 

provides us with another way of defining fuzzy aggregates. But the main 

thing is that it provides a general determination for smooth space that

 

 

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: • : « : • • : • « » • : ■ « : -

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

 

takes into account its differences from and relations to striated space: (1) 

we shall call striated or metric any aggregate with a whole number of 

dimensions, and for which it is possible to assign constant directions; (2) 

nonmetric smooth space is constituted by the construction of a line with a 

fractional number of dimensions greater than one, or of a surface with a 

fractional number of dimensions greater than two; (3) a fractional number 

of dimensions is the index of a properly directional space (with continuous 

variation in direction, and without tangent); (4) what defines smooth 

space, then, is that it does not have a dimension higher than that which 

moves through it or is inscribed in it; in this sense it is a flat multiplicity, for 

example, a line that fills a plane without ceasing to be a line; (5) space and 

that which occupies space tend to become identified, to have the same 

power, in the anexact yet rigorous form of the numbering or nonwhole 

number (occupy without counting); (6) a smooth, amorphous space of this 

kind is constituted by an accumulation of proximities, and each accumula-

tion defines a zone of indiscernibility proper to "becoming" (more than a 

line and less than a surface; less than a volume and more than a surface).

 

The Physical Model. The various models confirm a certain idea of 

stria-tion: two series of parallels that intersect perpendicularly, some of 

which, the verticals, are more in the role of fixed elements or constants, 

whereas the others, the horizontals, are more in the role of variables. This is 

roughly the case for the warp and the woof, harmony and melody, longitude 

and latitude. The more regular the intersection, the tighter the striation, the 

more homogeneous the space tends to become; it is for this reason that 

from the beginning homogeneity did not seem to us to be a characteristic 

of smooth space, but on the contrary, the extreme result of striation, or the 

limit-form of a space striated everywhere and in all directions. If the 

smooth and the homogeneous seem to communicate, it is only because 

when the striated attains its ideal of perfect homogeneity, it is apt to 

reimpart smooth space, by a movement that superposes itself upon that of 

the homogeneous but remains entirely different from it. In each model, 

the smooth actually seemed to pertain to a fundamental heterogeneity: felt 

or patchwork rather than weaving, rhythmic values rather than 

harmony-melody, Riemannian space rather than Euclidean space—a 

continuous variation that exceeds any distribution of constants and 

variables, the freeing of a line that does not pass between two points, the 

formation of a plane that does not proceed by parallel and perpendicular 

lines.

 

The link between the homogeneous and the striated can be expressed in 

terms of an imaginary, elementary physics. (1) You begin by striating space 

with parallel gravitational verticals. (2) The resultant of these parallels or 

forces is applied to a point inside the body occupying the space {center of

 

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THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 489

 

gravity). (3) The position of this point does not change when the direction 

of the parallel forces is changed, when they become perpendicular to their 

original direction. (4) You discover that gravity is a particular case of a uni-

versal attraction following straight lines or biunivocal relations between 

two bodies. (5) You define a general notion of workas a force-displacement 

relation in a certain direction. (6) You then have the physical basis for an 

increasingly perfect striated space, running not only vertically and hori-

zontally, but in every direction subordinated to points.

 

It is not even necessary to invoke this Newtonian pseudophysics. The 

Greeks already went from a space striated vertically, top to bottom, to a 

centered space with reversible and symmetrical relations in all directions, 

in other words, striated in every direction in such a way as to constitute a 

homogeneity. There is no question that these are like two models of the 

State apparatus, the vertical apparatus of the empire and the isotropic 

apparatus of the city-state.

21

 Geometry lies at the crossroads of a physics 

problem and an affair of the State.

 

It is obvious that the striation thus constituted has its limits: they are 

reached not only when the infinite (either infinitely large or small) is 

brought in, but also when more than two bodies are considered ("the 

three-body problem"). Let us try to understand in the simplest terms how 

space escapes the limits of its striation. At one pole, it escapes them by 
declination,  in other words, by the smallest deviation, by the infinitely 

small deviation between a gravitational vertical and the arc of a circle to 

which the vertical is tangent. At the other pole, it escapes them by the spiral 
or vortex, 
in other words, a figure in which all the points of space are 

simultaneously occupied according to laws of frequency or of 

accumulation, distribution; these laws are distinct from the so-called 

laminar distribution corresponding to the striation of parallels. From the 

smallest deviation to the vortex there is a valid and necessary relation of 

consequence: what stretches between them is precisely a smooth space 

whose element is declination and which is peopled by a spiral. Smooth 

space is constituted by the minimum angle, which deviates from the 

vertical, and by the vortex, which overspills striation. The strength of 

Michel Serres's book is that it demonstrates this link between the clinamen 

as a generative differential element, and the formation of vortices and 

turbulences insofar as they occupy an engendered smooth space; in fact, 

the atom of the ancients, from Democritus to Lucretius, was always 

inseparable from a hydraulics, or a generalized theory of swells and flows. 

The ancient atom is entirely misunderstood if it is overlooked that its 

essence is to course and flow. The theory of atomism is the basis for a 

strict correlation between Archimedean geometry (very different from 

the striated and homogeneous space of Euclid) and Democritean physics 

(very different from solid or lamellar matter).

22

 The

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

 

same coincidence means that this aggregate is no longer tied in any way to a 

State apparatus, but rather to a war machine: a physics of packs, turbu-

lences, "catastrophes," and epidemics corresponding to a geometry of war, 

of the art of war and its machines. Serres states what he considers to be 

Lucretius's deepest goal: to go from Mars to Venus, to place the war 

machine in the service of peace.

23

 But this operation is not accomplished 

through the State apparatus; it expresses, on the contrary, an ultimate 

metamorphosis of the war machine, and occurs in smooth space.

 

Earlier we encountered a distinction between "free action" in smooth 

space and "work" in striated space. During the nineteenth century a two-

fold elaboration was undertaken: of a physicoscientific concept of Work 

(weight-height, force-displacement), and of a socioeconomic concept of 

labor-power or abstract labor (a homogeneous abstract quantity applicable 

to all work, and susceptible to multiplication and division). There was a 

profound link between physics and sociology: society furnished an eco-

nomic standard of measure for work, and physics a "mechanical currency" 

for it. The wage regime had as its correlate a mechanics of force. Physics 

had never been more social, for in both cases it was a question of defining 

the constant mean value of a force of lift and pull exerted in the most uni-

form way possible by a standard-man. Impose the Work-model upon every 

activity, translate every act into possible or virtual work, discipline free 

action, or else (which amounts to the same thing) relegate it to "leisure," 

which exists only by reference to work. We now understand why the 

Work-model, in both its physical and social aspects, is a fundamental part 

of the State apparatus. Standard-man began as the man of public works.

2

It was not in relation to pin manufacturing that the problems of abstract 

labor, the multiplication of its results, and the division of its operations 

were first formulated; it was in public construction and in the organization 

of armies (not only the disciplining of men, but also the industrial 

production of weapons). Nothing more normal. The war machine in itself 

did not imply this normalization. But the State apparatus, in the 

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, found a new way of appropriating 

the war machine: by subjugating it before all else to the Work-model of the 

construction site and factory, which were in the process of developing 

elsewhere, but more slowly. The war machine was perhaps the first thing 

to be striated, to produce an abstract labor-time whose results could be 

multiplied and operations divided. That is where free action in smooth 

space must have been conquered. The physicosocial model of Work 

pertains to the State apparatus, it is one of its inventions, and for two 

reasons. First, because labor appears only with the constitution of a 
surplus,  
there is no labor that is not devoted to stockpiling;  in fact, labor 

(in the strict sense) begins only with what is called surplus labor. Second, 

labor performs a generalized opera-

 

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tion of striation of space-time, a subjection of free action, a nullification of 

smooth spaces, the origin and means of which is in the essential enterprise 

of the State, namely, its conquest of the war machine.

 

Counterdemonstration: where there is no State and no surplus labor, 

there is no Work-model either. Instead, there is the continuous variation of 

free action, passing from speech to action, from a given action to another, 

from action to song, from song to speech, from speech to enterprise, all in a 

strange chromaticism with intense but rare peak moments or moments of 

effort that the outside observer can only "translate" in terms of work. It is 

true that it has been said of blacks through the ages that "they don't work, 

they don't know what work is." It is true that they were forced to work, and 

to work more than anyone else, in terms of abstract quantity. It also seems 

to be true that the Indians had no understanding of, and were unsuited 

for, any organization of work, even slavery: the Americans apparently 

imported so many blacks only because they could not use the Indians, who 

would rather die. Certain outstanding ethnologists have raised an essential 

question. They have turned the problem around: so-called primitive socie-

ties are not societies of shortage or subsistence due to an absence of work, 

but on the contrary are societies of free action and smooth space that have 

no use for a work-factor, anymore than they constitute a stock.

25

 They are 

not societies of sloth, even though their differences with work may be 

expressed in the form of a "right to laziness." They are not without laws, 

even though their differences with the law may be expressed in the guise of 

"anarchy." What they have instead is a law of the nomos regulating a con-

tinuous variation of activity with a rigor and cruelty all its own (get rid of 

whatever cannot be transported, the old, children . . .).

 

If work constitutes a striated space-time corresponding to the State 

apparatus, is this not especially true of its archaic or ancient forms? For it is 

there that surplus labor is isolated, distinguished, in the form of tribute or 

corvee. Consequently, it is there that the concept of labor appears at its 

clearest, for example, in the large-scale works of the empires, the urban, 

agricultural, or hydraulic works by which a "laminar" flow in supposedly 

parallel layers (striation) is imposed upon the waters. It seems on the con-

trary that in the capitalist regime, surplus labor becomes less and less dis-

tinguishable from labor "strictly speaking," and totally impregnates it. 

Modern public works have a different status from that of large-scale imper-

ial works. How could one possibly distinguish between the time necessary 

for reproduction and "extorted" time, when they are no longer separated in 

time? This remark certainly does not contradict the Marxist theory of sur-

plus value, for Marx shows precisely that surplus value ceases to be 
localizable 
in the capitalist regime. That is even his fundamental contri-

bution. It gave him a sense that machines would themselves become

 

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productive of surplus value and that the circulation of capital would chal-

lenge the distinction between variable and constant capital. In these new 

conditions, it remains true that all labor involves surplus labor; but surplus 

labor no longer requires labor. Surplus labor, capitalist organization in its 

entirety, operates less and less by the striation of space-time corresponding 

to the physicosocial concept of work. Rather, it is as though human aliena-

tion through surplus labor were replaced by a generalized "machinic 

enslavement," such that one may furnish surplus-value without doing any 

work (children, the retired, the unemployed, television viewers, etc.). Not 

only does the user as such tend to become an employee, but capitalism 

operates less on a quantity of labor than by a complex qualitative process 

bringing into play modes of transportation, urban models, the media, the 

entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling—every semiotic 

system. It is as though, at the outcome of the striation that capitalism was 

able to carry to an unequaled point of perfection, circulating capital neces-

sarily recreated, reconstituted, a sort of smooth space in which the destiny 

of human beings is recast. Striation, of course, survives in the most perfect 

and severest of forms (it is not only vertical but operates in all directions); 

however, it relates primarily to the state pole of capitalism, in other words, 

to the role of the modern State apparatuses in the organization of capital. 

On the other hand, at the complementary and dominant level of integrated 
(or rather integrating) world capitalism, 
a new smooth space is produced in 

which capital reaches its "absolute" speed, based on machinic components 

rather than the human component of labor. The multinationals fabricate a 

kind of deterritorialized smooth space in which points of occupation as 

well as poles of exchange become quite independent of the classical paths 

to striation. What is really new are always the new forms of turnover. The 

present-day accelerated forms of the circulation of capital are making the 

distinctions between constant and variable capital, and even fixed and cir-

culating capital, increasingly relative; the essential thing is instead the dis-

tinction between striated capital and smooth capital, and the way in which 

the former gives rise to the latter through complexes that cut across terri-

tories and States, and even the different types of States.

 

The Aesthetic Model: Nomad Art. Several notions, both practical and the-

oretical, are suitable for defining nomad art and its successors (barbarian, 

Gothic, and modern). First, "close-range" vision, as distinguished from 

long-distance vision; second, "tactile," or rather "haptic" space, as distin-

guished from optical space. "Haptic" is a better word than "tactile" since it 

does not establish an opposition between two sense organs but rather 

invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill this nonoptical func-

tion. It was Alois Riegl who, in some marvelous pages, gave fundamental

 

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aesthetic status to the couple, close vision-haptic space. But for the moment 

we should set aside the criteria proposed by Riegl (then by Wilhelm 

Worringer, and more recently by Henri Maldiney), and take some risks 

ourselves, making free use of these notions.

26

 It seems to us that the Smooth 

is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic 

space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile). The Striated, on 

the contrary, relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space— 

although the eye in turn is not the only organ to have this capacity. Once 

again, as always, this analysis must be corrected by a coefficient of transfor-

mation according to which passages between the striated and the smooth 

are at once necessary and uncertain, and all the more disruptive. The law of 

the painting is that it be done at close range, even if it is viewed from rela-

tively far away. One can back away from a thing, but it is a bad painter who 

backs away from the painting he or she is working on. Or from the "thing" 

for that matter: Cezanne spoke of the need to no longer see the wheat field, 

to be too close to it, to lose oneself without landmarks in smooth space. 

Afterward, striation can emerge: drawing, strata, the earth, "stubborn 

geometry," the "measure of the world," "geological foundations," "every-

thing falls straight down" . . . The striated itself may in turn disappear in a 

"catastrophe," opening the way for a new smooth space, and another stri-

ated space...

 

A painting is done at close range, even if it is seen from a distance. Simi-

larly, it is said that composers do not hear: they have close-range hearing, 

whereas listeners hear from a distance. Even writers write with short-term 

memory, whereas readers are assumed to be endowed with long-term 

memory. The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that 

its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it 

operates step by step. Examples are the desert, steppe, ice, and sea, local 

spaces of pure connection. Contrary to what is sometimes said, one never 

sees from a distance in a space of this kind, nor does one see it from a dis-

tance; one is never "in front of," any more than one is "in" (one is "on" ...). 

Orientations are not constant but change according to temporary vegeta-

tion, occupations, and precipitation. There is no visual model for points of 

reference that would make them interchangeable and unite them in an 

inertial class assignable to an immobile outside observer. On the contrary, 

they are tied to any number of observers, who may be qualified as "mon-

ads" but are instead nomads  entertaining tactile relations among them-

selves. The interlinkages do not imply an ambient space in which the 

multiplicity would be immersed and which would make distances invari-

ant; rather, they are constituted according to ordered differences that give 

rise to intrinsic variations in the division of a single distance.

27

 These ques-

tions of orientation, location, and linkage enter into play in the most

 

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famous works of nomad art: the twisted animals have no land beneath 

them; the ground constantly changes direction, as in aerial acrobatics; the 

paws point in the opposite direction from the head, the hind part of the 

body is turned upside down; the "monadological" points of view can be 

interlinked only on a nomad space; the whole and the parts give the eye that 

beholds them a function that is haptic rather than optical. This is an 

animality that can be seen only by touching it with one's mind, but without 

the mind becoming a finger, not even by way of the eye. (In a much cruder 

fashion, the kaleidoscope has exactly the same function: to give the eye a 

digital function.) Striated space, on the contrary, is defined by the require-

ments of long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, in variance of dis-

tance through an interchange of inertial points of reference, interlinkage by 

immersion in an ambient milieu, constitution of a central perspective. It is 

less easy to evaluate the creative potentialities of striated space, and how it 

can simultaneously emerge from the smooth and give everything a whole 

new impetus.

 

The opposition between the striated and the smooth is not simply that of 

the global and the local. For in one case, the global is still relative, whereas 

in the other the local is already absolute. Where there is close vision, space 

is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic, nonoptical function: no 

line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance; there is nei-

ther horizon nor background nor perspective nor limit nor outline or form 

nor center; there is no intermediary distance, or all distance is intermedi-

ary. Like Eskimo space.

28

 In a totally different way, in a totally different 

context, Arab architecture constitutes a space that begins very near and 

low, placing the light and the airy below and the solid and heavy above. 

This reversal of the laws of gravity turns lack of direction and negation of 

volume into constructive forces. There exists a nomadic absolute, as a local 

integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in an 

infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction. It is an absolute 

that is one with becoming itself, with process. It is the absolute of passage, 

which in nomad art merges with its manifestation. Here the absolute is 

local, precisely because place is not delimited. If we now turn to the striated 

and optical space of long-distance vision, we see that the relative global 

that characterizes that space also requires the absolute, but in an entirely 

different way. The absolute is now the horizon or background, in other 

words, the Encompassing Element without which nothing would be global 

or englobed. It is against this background that the relative outline or form 

appears. The absolute itself can appear in the Encompassed, but only in a 

privileged place well delimited as a center, which then functions to repel 

beyond the limits anything that menaces the global integration. We can see 

clearly here how smooth space subsists, but only to give rise to the striated.

 

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The desert, sky, or sea, the Ocean, the Unlimited, first plays the role of an 

encompassing element, and tends to become a horizon: the earth is thus 

surrounded, globalized, "grounded" by this element, which holds it in 

immobile equilibrium and makes Form possible. Then to the extent that 

the encompassing element itself appears at the center of the earth, it 

assumes a second role, that of casting into the loathesome deep, the abode 

of the dead, anything smooth or nonmeasured that may have remained.

29 

The striation of the earth implies as its necessary condition this double 

treatment of the smooth: on the one hand, it is carried or reduced to the 

absolute state of an encompassing horizon, and on the other it is expelled 

from the relative encompassed element. Thus the great imperial religions 

need a smooth space like the desert, but only in order to give it a law that is 

opposed to the nomos in every way, and converts the absolute.

 

This perhaps explains for us the ambiguity of the excellent analyses by 

Riegl, Worringer, and Maldiney. They approach haptic space under the 

imperial conditions of Egyptian art. They define it as the presence of a 

horizon-background; the reduction of space to the plane (vertical and hori-

zontal, height and width); and the rectilinear outline enclosing individual-

ity and withdrawing it from change. Like the pyramid-form, every side a 

plane surface, against the background of the immobile desert. On the other 

hand, they show how in Greek art (then in Byzantine art, and up to the Ren-

aissance), an optical space was differentiated from haptic space, one merg-

ing background with form, setting up an interference between the planes, 

conquering depth, working with cubic or voluminous extension, organiz-

ing perspective, and playing on relief and shadow, light and color. Thus at 

the very beginning they encounter the haptic at a point of mutation, in con-

ditions under which it already serves to striate space. The optical makes 

that striation tighter and more perfect, or rather tight and perfect in a dif-

ferent way (it is not associated with the same "artistic will"). Everything 

occurs in a striated space that goes from empires to city-states, or evolved 

empires. It is not by chance that Riegl tends to eliminate the specific fac-

tors of nomad or even barbarian art; or that Worringer, when he introduces 

the idea of Gothic art in the broadest sense, relates it on the one hand to the 

Germanic and Celtic migrations of the North, and on the other to the 

empires of the East. But between the two were the nomads, who are reduci-

ble neither to empires they confronted nor the migrations they triggered. 

The Goths themselves were nomads of the steppe, and with the Sarmatians 

and Huns were an essential vector of communication between the East and 

the North, a factor irreducible to either of these two dimensions.

30

 On one 

side, Egypt had its Hyksos, Asia Minor its Hittites, China its 

Turco-Mongols; and on the other, the Hebrews had their Habiru, the 

Germans, Celts, and Romans their Goths, the Arabs their Bedouins. The 

nomads

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

 

have a specificity that is too hastily reduced to its consequences, by includ-

ing them in the empires or counting them among the migrants, assimilat-

ing them to one or the other, denying them their own "will" to art. Again, 

there is a refusal to accept that the intermediary between the East and the 

North had its own absolute specificity, that the intermediary, the interval, 

played exactly this substantial role. Moreover, it does not have that role in 

the guise of a "will"; it only has a becoming, it invents a "becoming-artist."

 

When we invoke a primordial duality between the smooth and the stri-

ated, it is in order to subordinate the differences between "haptic" and 

"optic," "close vision" and "distant vision" to this distinction. Hence we 

will not define the haptic by the immobile background, by the plane and 

the contour, because these have to do with an already mixed state in which 

the haptic serves to striate, and uses its smooth components only in order 

to convert them to another kind of space. The haptic function and close 

vision presuppose the smooth, which has no background, plane, or con-

tour, but rather changes in direction and local linkages between parts. Con-

versely, the developed optical function is not content to take striation to a 

new level of perfection, endowing it with an imaginary universal value and 

scope; it is also capable of reinstating the smooth, liberating light and mod-

ulating color, restoring a kind of aerial haptic space that constitutes the 

unlimited site of intersection of the planes.

31

 In short, the smooth and the 

striated must be defined in themselves before the relative distinctions 

between haptic and optical, near and distant, can be derived.

 

This is where a third couple enters in: "abstract line-concrete line" (in 

addition to "haptic-optical," "close-distant"). It is Worringer who 

accorded fundamental importance to the abstract line, seeing it as the very 

beginning of art or the first expression of an artistic will. Art as abstract 

machine. Once again, it will doubtless be our inclination to voice in 

advance the same objections: for Worringer, the abstract line seems to 

make its first appearance in the crystalline or geometrical imperial Egyp-

tian form, the most rectilinear of forms possible. It is only afterward that it 

assumes a particular avatar, constituting the "Gothic or Northern line" 

understood very broadly.

32

 For us, on the other hand, the abstract line is 

fundamentally "Gothic," or rather, nomadic, not rectilinear. Conse-

quently, we do not understand the aesthetic motivation for the abstract line 

in the same way, or its identity with the beginning of art. Whereas the recti-

linear (or "regularly" rounded) Egyptian line is negatively motivated by 

anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows, or varies, and erects the con-

stancy and eternity of an In-Itself, the nomad line is abstract in an entirely 

different sense, precisely because it has a multiple orientation and passes 
between  points, figures, and contours: it is positively motivated by the 

smooth space it draws, not by any striation it might perform to ward off

 

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THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 497

 

anxiety and subordinate the smooth. The abstract line is the affect of 

smooth spaces, not a feeling of anxiety that calls forth striation. Further-

more, although it is true that art begins only with the abstract line, the rea-

son is not, as Worringer says, that the rectilinear is the first means of 

breaking with the nonaesthetic imitation of nature upon which the prehis-

toric, savage, and childish supposedly depend, lacking, as he thinks they 

do, a "will to art." On the contrary, if prehistoric art is fully art it is precisely 

because it manipulates the abstract, though nonrectilinear, line: "Primi-

tive art begins with the abstract, and even the prefigurative.... Art is 

abstract from the outset, and at its origin could not have been otherwise."

33 

In 

effect, the line is all the more abstract when writing is absent, either 

because it has yet to develop or only exists outside or alongside. When writ-

ing takes charge of abstraction, as it does in empires, the line, already 

downgraded, necessarily tends to become concrete, even figurative. Chil-

dren forget how to draw. But in the absence of writing, or when peoples 

have no need for a writing system of their own because theirs is borrowed 

from more or less nearby empires (as was the case for the nomads), the line 

is necessarily abstract; it is necessarily invested with all the power of 

abstraction, which finds no other outlet. That is why we believe that the dif-

ferent major types of imperial lines—the Egyptian rectilinear line, the 

Assyrian (or Greek) organic line, the supraphenomenal, encompassing 

Chinese line—convert the abstract line, rend it from its smooth space, and 

accord it concrete values. Still, it can be argued that these imperial lines are 

contemporaneous with the abstract line; the abstract line is no less at the 

"beginning," inasmuch as it is a pole always presupposed by any line capa-

ble of constituting another pole. The abstract line is at the beginning as 

much because of its historical abstraction as its prehistoric dating. It is 

therefore a part of the originality or irreducibility of nomad art, even when 

there is reciprocal interaction, influence, and confrontation with the 

imperial lines of sedentary art.

 

The abstract is not directly opposed to the figurative. The figurative as 

such is not inherent to any "will to art." In fact, we may oppose a figurative 

line in art to one that is not. The figurative, or imitation and representa-

tion, is a consequence, a result of certain characteristics of the line when it 

assumes a given form. We must therefore define those characteristics first. 

Take a system in which transversals are subordinated to diagonals, diago-

nals to horizontals and verticals, and horizontals and verticals to points 

(even when there are virtual). A system of this kind, which is rectilinear or 

unilinear regardless of the number of lines, expresses the formal conditions 

under which a space is striated and the line describes a contour. Such a line 

is inherently, formally, representative in itself, even if it does not represent 

anything. On the other hand, a line that delimits nothing, that describes no

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

 

contour, that no longer goes from one point to another but instead passes 

between points, that is always declining from the horizontal and the verti-

cal and deviating from the diagonal, that is constantly changing direction, 

a mutant line of this kind that is without outside or inside, form or back-

ground, beginning or end and that is as alive as a continuous variation— 

such a line is truly an abstract line, and describes a smooth space. It is not 

inexpressive. Yet is true that it does not constitute a stable and symmetrical 
form of expression grounded in a resonance of points and a conjunction of 

lines. It is nevertheless accompanied by material traits of expression, the 

effects of which multiply step by step. This is what Worringer means when 

he says that the Gothic line (for us, the nomadic line invested with abstrac-

tion) has the power of expression and not of form, that it has repetition as a 

power, not symmetry as form. Indeed, it is through symmetry that rectilin-

ear systems limit repetition, preventing infinite progression and maintain-

ing the organic  domination of a central point with radiating lines, as in 

reflected or star-shaped figures. It is free action, however, which by its 

essence unleashes the power of repetition as a machinic force that multi-

plies its effect and pursues an infinite movement. Free action proceeds by 

disjunction and decentering, or at least by peripheral movement: dis-

jointed polythetism instead of symmetrical antithetism.

34

 Traits of expres-

sion describing a smooth space and connecting with a matter-flow thus 

should not be confused with striae that convert space and make it a form of 

expression that grids and organizes matter.

 

Worringer's finest pages are those in which he contrasts the abstract 

with the organic. The organic does not designate something represented, 

but above all the form of representation, and even the feeling that unites 

representation with a subject {Einfuhlung, "empathy"). "Formal processes 

occur within the work of art which correspond to the natural organic ten-

dencies in man."

35

 But the rectilinear, the geometrical, cannot be opposed 

to the organic in this sense. The Greek organic line, which subordinates 

volume and spatiality, takes over from the Egyptian geometrical line, 

which reduced them to the plane. The organic, with its symmetry and con-

tours inside and outside, still refers to the rectilinear coordinates of a stri-

ated space. The organic body is prolonged by straight lines that attach it to 

what lies in the distance. Hence the primacy of human beings, or of the 

face: We are this form of expression itself, simultaneously the supreme 

organism and the relation of all organisms to metric space in general. The 

abstract, on the contrary, begins only with what Worringer presents as the 

"Gothic" avatar. It is this nomadic line that he says is mechanical, but in 

free action and swirling; it is inorganic, yet alive, and all the more alive for 

being inorganic. It is distinguished both from the geometrical and the 

organic. It raises "mechanical" relations to the level of intuition. Heads

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED □ 499

 

(even a human being's when it is not a face) unravel and coil into ribbons in 

a continuous process; mouths curl in spirals. Hair, clothes. . . This stream-

ing, spiraling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation liberates a 

power of life that human beings had rectified and organisms had confined, 

and which matter now expresses as the trait, flow, or impulse traversing it. 

If everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organized 

but, on the contrary, because the organism is a diversion of life. In short, 

the life in question is inorganic, germinal, and intensive, a powerful life 

without organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs, 

everything that passes between  organisms ("once the natural barriers of 

organic movement have been overthrown, there are no more limits").

36 

Many authors have wished to establish a kind of duality in nomad art 

between the ornamental abstract line and animal motifs, or more subtly, 

between the speed with which the line integrates and carries expressive 

traits, and the slowness or fixity of the animal matter traversed, between a 

line of flight without beginning or end and an almost immobile swirling. 

But in the end everyone agrees that it is a question of a single will, or a single 

becoming.

37

 This is not because the abstract engenders organic motifs, by 

chance or by association. Rather, it is precisely because pure animality is 

experienced as inorganic, or supraorganic, that it can combine so well with 

abstraction, and even combine the slowness or heaviness of a matter with 

the extreme speed of a line that has become entirely spiritual. The slowness 

belongs to the same world as the extreme speed: relations of speed and 

slowness between elements, which surpass in every way the movement of 

an organic form and the determination of organs. The line escapes geome-

try by a fugitive mobility at the same time as life tears itself free from the 

organic by a permutating, stationary whirlwind. This vital force specific to 

the Abstraction is what draws smooth space. The abstract line is the affect 

of smooth space, just as organic representation was the feeling presiding 

over striated space. The haptic-optical, near-distant distinctions must be 

subordinated to the distinction between the abstract line and the organic 

line; they must find their principle in a general confrontation of spaces. 

The abstract line cannot be defined as geometrical and rectilinear. What 

then should be termed abstract in modern art? A line of variable direction 

that describes no contour and delimits no form . . ,

38

 

Do not multiply models. We are well aware that there are many others: a 

ludic model, which would compare games according to their type of space 

and found game theory on different principles (for example, the smooth 

space of Go versus the striated space of chess); and a noological model con-

cerned not with thought contents (ideology) but with the form, manner or 

mode, and function of thought, according to the mental space it draws and

 

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1440: THE SMOOTH AND THE STRIATED

 

from the point of view of a general theory of thought, a thinking of thought. 

And so on. Moreover, there are still other kinds of space that should be 

taken into account, for example, holey space and the way it communicates 

with the smooth and the striated in different ways. What interests us in 

operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combi-

nations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how 

in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth 

spaces. Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the 

city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are 

sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth 

spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or dis-

placed in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, 

invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space 

will suffice to save us.

 

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15. Conclusion: Concrete Rules and 

Abstract Machines

 

 

 

Computer Einstein

 

501

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502 □ CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

 

S

 

Strata, stratification

 

The strata are phenomena of thickening on the Body of the earth, 3 

simultaneously molecular and molar: accumulations, coagulations, 

sedimentations, foldings. They are Belts, Pincers, or Articulations. 

Summarily and traditionally, we distinguish three major strata: 

physicochemical, organic, and anthropomorphic (or "alloplastic"). 

Each stratum, or articulation, consists of coded milieus and formed 

substances.  Forms and substances, codes and milieus are not really 

distinct. They are the abstract components of every articulation.

 

A stratum obviously presents very diverse forms and substances, a 

variety of codes and milieus. It thus possesses both different formal 

Types of organization and different substantial Modes of develop-

ment, which divide it into parastrata and epistrata, for example, the 

divisions of the organic stratum. The epistrata and parastrata subdi-

viding a stratum can be considered strata themselves (so that the list 

is never exhaustive). A given stratum retains a unity of composition 

in spite of the diversity in its organization and development. The 

unity of composition relates to formal traits common to all of the 

forms or codes of a stratum, and to substantial elements, materials 

common to all of the stratum's substances or milieus.

 

The strata are extremely mobile. One stratum is always capable 

of serving as the substratum  of another, or of colliding with 

another, independently of any evolutionary order. Above all, 

be-ween two strata or between two stratic divisions, there are 
inter-stratic  phenomena: transcodings and passages between 

milieus, intermixings. Rhythms pertain to these interstratic 

movements, which are also acts of stratification. Stratification is like 

the creation of the world from chaos, a continual, renewed creation. 

And the strata constitute the Judgment of God. Classical artists are 

like God, they make the world by organizing forms and substances, 

codes and milieus, and rhythms.

 

Articulation, which is constitutive of a stratum, is always a double 

articulation (double pincer). What is articulated is a content and an 
expression. 
Whereas form and substance are not really distinct, con-

tent and expression are. Hjelmslev's net is applicable to the strata: 

articulation of content and articulation of expression, with content 

and expression each possessing its own form and substance. Between 

them, between content and expression, there is neither a correspon-

dence nor a cause-effect relation nor a signified-signifier relation:

 

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CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES D 503

 

there is real distinction, reciprocal presupposition, and only 

isomor-phy. But content and expression are not distinguished from 

each other in the same fashion on each stratum: the distribution of 

content and expression is not the same on the three major strata 

(there is, for example, a "linearization" of expression on the organic 

stratum, and a "superlinearity" of the anthropomorphic strata). That 

is why the molar and the molecular have very different 

combinations depending on the stratum considered.

 

What movement, what impulse, sweeps us outside the strata 

and (metastratd)"] Of course, there is no reason to think that all matter is

 

4  confined to the physicochemical strata: there exists a submolecular, 

unformed Matter. Similarly, not all Life is confined to the organic 

strata: rather, the organism is that which life sets against itself in order 

to limit itself, and there is a life all the more intense, all the more pow 

erful for being anorganic. There are also nonhuman Becomings of 

human beings that overspill the anthropomorphic strata in all direc 

tions. But how can we reach this "plane," or rather how can we con 

struct it, and how can we draw the "line" leading us there? For outside 

the strata or in the absence of strata we no longer have forms or sub 

stances, organization or development, content or expression. We are 

disarticulated; we no longer even seem to be sustained by rhythms. 

How could unformed matter, anorganic life, nonhuman becoming be 

anything but chaos pure and simple? Every undertaking of 

destratification (for example, going beyond the organism, plunging 

into a becoming) must therefore observe concrete rules of extreme

 

6 caution: a too-sudden destratification may be suicidal, or turn can-

cerous. In other words, it will sometimes end in chaos, the void and 

destruction, and sometimes lock us back into the strata, which 

become more rigid still, losing their degrees of diversity, differentia-

tion, and mobility.

 

A

 

Assemblages

 

Assemblages are already different from strata. They are produced in 11 

the strata, but operate in zones where milieus become decoded: they 

begin by extracting a territory  from the milieus. Every assemblage is 

basically territorial. The first concrete rule for assemblages is to dis-

cover what territoriality they envelop, for there always is one: in their 

trash can or on their bench, Beckett's characters stake out a territory. 

Discover the territorial assemblages of someone, human or animal:

 

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CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

 

"home." The territory is made of decoded fragments of all kinds, 

which are borrowed from the milieus but then assume the value of 

"properties": even rhythms take on a new meaning (refrains). The ter-

ritory makes the assemblage. The territory is more than the organism 

and the milieu, and the relation between the two; that is why the 

assemblage goes beyond mere "behavior" (hence the importance of 

the relative distinction between territorial animals and milieu 

animals).

 

Inasmuch as they are territorial, assemblages still belong to the 

strata. At least they pertain to them in one of their aspects, and it is 

under this aspect that we distinguish in every assemblage content 4 

from expression. It is necessary to ascertain the content and the 

expression of each assemblage, to evaluate their real distinction, their 

reciprocal presupposition, their piecemeal insertions. The reason that 

the assemblage is not confined to the strata is that expression in it 

becomes a semiotic system, a regime of signs, and content becomes a 
pragmatic system, actions and passions. This is the double articulation 

face-hand, gesture-word, and the reciprocal presupposition between the 

two. This is the first division of every assemblage: it is simultaneously 

and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an assemblage of 

enunciation. In each case, it is necessary to ascertain both what is said 

and what is done. There is a new relation between content and 

expression that was not yet present in the strata: the statements or 

expressions express incorporeal transformations that are "attributed" 

as such (properties) to bodies or contents. In the strata, expressions do 

not form signs, nor contents pragmata,  so this autonomous zone of 

incorporeal transformations expressed by the former and attributed to 

the latter does not appear. Of course, regimes of signs develop only in 

the alloplastic or anthropomorphic strata (including territorialized 

animals). But this does not mean that they do not permeate all of the 

strata, and overspill each of them. Assemblages belong to the strata to 

the extent that the distinction between content and expression still 

holds for them. We may also think of regimes of signs and pragmatic 

systems as strata in their own right, in the broad sense previously 

mentioned. But because the content-expression distinction assumes a 

new figure, we are already in a different element than that of the strata 

in the narrow sense.

 

The assemblage is also divided along another axis. Its territoriality 

(content and expression included) is only a first aspect; the other 

aspect is constituted by lines of deterritorialization that cut across it 

and carry it away. These lines are very diverse: some open the territor-

ial assemblage onto other assemblages (for example, the territorial

 

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CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES □ 505

 

refrain of the animal becomes a courtship or group refrain). Others 

operate directly upon the territoriality of the assemblage, and open it 

onto a land that is eccentric, immemorial, or yet to come (for example, 

the game of territory and the earth in the lied, or in the romantic 11 artist 

in general). Still others open assemblages onto abstract and cos-and mic 

machines that they effectuate. The territoriality of the assem-4 blage 

originates in a certain decoding of milieus, and is just as necessarily 

extended by lines of deterritorialization. The territory is just as 

inseparable from deterritorialization as the code from decoding. 

Following these lines, the assemblage no longer presents an expression 

distinct from content, only unformed matters, destrati-fied forces, and 

functions. The concrete rules of assemblage thus operate along these two 

axes: On the one hand, what is the territoriality of the assemblage, what 

is the regime of signs and the pragmatic system? On the other hand, 

what are the cutting edges of deterritorialization, and what abstract 

machines do they effectuate? The assemblage is tetravalent: (1) content 

and expression; (2) territoriality and deterritorialization. That is why 

there were four aspects in the privileged example of Kafka's 

assemblages.

 

R

 

Rhizome

 

Not only strata, assemblages are complexes of lines. We can identify a 

first state of the line, or a first kind of line: the line is subordinated to 

the point; the diagonal is subordinated to the horizontal and vertical; 

the line forms a contour, whether figurative or not; the space it consti-

tutes is one of striation; the countable multiplicity it constitutes 

remains subordinated to the One in an always superior or supplemen-

tary dimension. Lines of this type are molar, and form a segmentary, 

circular, binary, arborescent system.

 

The second kind is very different, molecular and of the "rhizome" 

type. The diagonal frees itself, breaks or twists. The line no longer 

forms a contour, and instead passes between things, between points. It 

belongs to a smooth space. It draws a plane that has no more dimen-

sions than that which crosses it; therefore the multiplicity it consti-

tutes is no longer subordinated to the One, but takes on a consistency 

of its own. These are multiplicities of masses or packs, not of classes; 

anomalous and nomadic multiplicities, not normal or legal ones; 

multiplicities of becoming, or transformational multiplicities, not 

countable elements and ordered relations; fuzzy, not exact aggre-

 

10 

9

 

and

 

1

 

2

 

10

 

12

 

and 14

 

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CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

 

gates, etc. At the level of pathos, these multiplicities are expressed by 

psychosis and especially schizophrenia. At the level of pragmatics, 

they are utilized by sorcery. At the level of theory, the status of multi-

plicities is correlative to that of spaces, and vice versa: smooth spaces 

of the type desert, steppe, or sea are not without people; they are not 

depopulated but rather are populated by multiplicities of this second 

kind (mathematics and music have gone quite far in the elaboration 

of this theory of multiplicities).

 

It is not enough, however, to replace the opposition between the 

One and the multiple with a distinction between types of multiplici-

 

9 ties. For the distinction between the two types does not preclude their 

immanence to each other, each "issuing" from the other after its fash-

ion. It is not so much that some multiplicities are arborescent and 

others not, but that there is an arborification of multiplicities. That is 

what happens when the black holes scattered along a rhizome begin 

to resonate together, or when the stems form segments that striate 

space in all directions, rendering it comparable, divisible, homoge-

 

12 neous (as we saw in particular in the case of the Face). That is also 

what happens when "mass" movements or molecular flows conjugate 

at points of accumulation or stoppage that segment and rectify them. 

But conversely, and without symmetry, the stems of the rhizome are 

always taking leave of the trees, the masses and flows are constantly 

escaping, inventing connections that jump from tree to tree and 

uproot them: a whole smoothing of space, which in turn reacts back 

upon striated space. Even, and especially, territories are perturbed by 

these deep movements. Or language: the trees of language are shaken 

by buddings and rhizomes. So that rhizome lines oscillate between

 

8  tree lines that segment and even stratify them, and lines of flight or 

and rupture that carry them away.

 

9  We are therefore made of three lines, but each kind of line has its 

dangers. Not only the segmented lines that cleave us, and impose 

upon us the striations of a homogeneous space, but also the molecular 

lines, already ferrying their micro-black holes, and finally the lines of 

flight themselves, which always risk abandoning their creative poten 

tialities and turning into a line of death, being turned into a line of 

destruction pure and simple (fascism).

 

C 

Plane of Consistency, Body without Organs 

The plane of consistency or of composition (planomenon) is opposed

 

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CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES □ 507

 

10  to the plane of organization and development. Organization and 

development concern form and substance: at once the development 

of form and the formation of substance or a subject. But the plane of 

consistency knows nothing of substance and form: haecceities, which 

are inscribed on this plane, are precisely modes of individuation pro-

ceeding neither by form nor by the subject. The plane consists 

abstractly, but really, in relations of speed and slowness between 

unformed elements, and in compositions of corresponding intensive 

affects (the "longitude" and "latitude" of the plane). In another sense, 

consistency concretely ties together heterogeneous, disparate ele- 

11  ments as such: it assures the consolidation of fuzzy aggregates, in 

other words, multiplicities of the rhizome type. In effect, consistency, 

proceeding by consolidation, acts necessarily in the middle, by the 

middle, and stands opposed to all planes of principle or finality. 

Spinoza, Holderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche are the surveyors of such a 

plane of consistency. Never unifications, never totalizations, but 

rather consistencies or consolidations. 

10 Inscribed on the plane of consistency are haecceities, events, incor-

poreal transformations that are apprehended in themselves; nomadic 
essences, 
vague yet rigorous; continuums of intensities or continuous

 

4, 6 variations, which go beyond constants and variables; becomings,

 

1, 9 which have neither culmination nor subject, but draw one another 

into zones of proximity or undecidability; smooth spaces, composed 

from within striated space. We will say that a body without organs, or

 

6   bodies without organs (plateaus) comes into play in individuation by 

and haecceity, in the production of intensities beginning at a degree zero,

 

10 in the matter of variation, in the medium of becoming or transforma-

tion, and in the smoothing of space. A powerful nonorganic life that

 

14 escapes the strata, cuts across assemblages, and draws an abstract line 

without contour, a line of nomad art and itinerant metallurgy.

 

Does the plane of consistency constitute the body without organs, 

or does the body without organs compose the plane? Are the Body 

without Organs and the Plane the same thing? In any event, composer 

and composed have the same power: the line does not have a dimen-

sion superior to that of the point, nor the surface to that of the line,

 

10 nor the volume to that of the surface, but always an anexact, frac-and 

tional number of dimensions that constantly increase or decrease

 

14 with the number of its parts. The plane sections multiplicities of vari-

able dimensions. The question is, therefore, the mode of connection 

between the different parts of the plane: To what extent do the bodies 

without organs interconnect? How are the continuums of intensity 

extended? What is the order of the transformational series? What are

 

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CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

 

these alogical linkages always effected in the middle, through which 

the plane is constructed piece by piece in ascending or descending 

fractional order? The plane is like a row of doors. And the concrete 

rules for the construction of the plane obtain to the extent that they 

exercise a selective role. It is the plane, in other words, the mode of 

connection, that provides the means of eliminating the empty and 

cancerous bodies that rival the body without organs, of rejecting the 

homogeneous surfaces that overlay smooth space, and neutralizing 

the lines of death and destruction that divert the line of flight. What 

is retained and preserved, therefore created, what consists, is only 
that which increases the number of connections at each level of 

division or composition, thus in descending as well as ascending 

order (that which is cannot be divided without changing in nature, or 

enter into a larger composition without requiring a new criterion of 

comparison...).

 

D

 

Deterritorialization

 

The function of deterritorialization: D is the movement by which 5 

"one" leaves the territory. It is the operation of the line of flight. There 

are very different cases. D may be overlaid by a compensatory 

reterritorialization obstructing the line of flight: D is then said to be 
negative.  Anything can serve as a reterritorialization, in other words, 

"stand for" the lost territory; one can reterritorialize on a being, an 

object, a book, an apparatus or system.. . For example, it is inaccurate 

to say that the State apparatus is territorial: it in fact performs a D, but 

one immediately overlaid by reterritorializations on property, work, 

and money (clearly, that landowner ship, public or private, is not 

territorial but reterritorializing). Among regimes of signs, the 
signifying regime certainly attains a high level of D; but because it 

simultaneously sets up a whole system of reterritorializations on the 

signified, and on the signifier itself, it blocks the line of flight, allowing 

only a negative D to persist. Another case is when D becomes 

positive—in other words, when it prevails over the reterritorializations, 

which play only a secondary role—but nevertheless remains relative 

because the line of flight it draws is segmented, is divided into 

successive "proceedings," sinks into black holes, or even ends up in a 

generalized black hole (catastrophe). This is the case of the regime of 
subjective signs, 
with its passional and consciousness-related D, which 

is positive but only in

 

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CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES □ 509

 

a relative sense. It will be noted immediately that these two major 

forms of D are not in a simple evolutionary relation to each other: 

the second may break away from the first, or it may lead into it (nota-

bly when the segmentations of converging lines of flight bring an 

overall reterritorialization or one benefiting a particular segment, 

thus arresting the movement of escape). There are all kinds of mixed 

figures, assuming highly varied forms of D.

 

Is there absolute  D, and what does "absolute" mean? We must 

first have a better understanding of the relations between D, the 

territory, reterritorialization, and the earth. To begin with, the terri-

tory itself is inseparable from vectors of deterritorialization work-

 

9  ing it from within: either because the territoriality is supple and 

and "marginal," in other words, itinerant, or because the territorial

 

13  assemblage itself opens onto and is carried off by other types of 

11 assemblages. Second, D is in turn inseparable from correlative

 

reterritorializations. D is never simple, but always multiple and 

composite: not only because it participates in various forms at the same 

time, but also because it converges distinct speeds and movements on 

the basis of which one may assign at a given moment a 

"deterritorialized element" and a "deterritorializing element." Now, 

reterritorialization as an original operation does not express a return to 

the territory, but rather these differential relations inter-7 nal to D itself, 

this multiplicity internal to the line of flight (cf. "The-and orems of D"). 

Finally, the earth is not at all the opposite of D: This

 

10  can already be seen in the mystery of the "natal," in which the earth 

as ardent, eccentric, or intense focal point is outside the territory 

11  and exists only in the movement of D. More than that, the earth, the 

glacial, is Deterritorialization par excellence: that is why it belongs 

3 to the Cosmos, and presents itself as the material through which 

human beings tap cosmic forces. We could say that the earth, as 

deterritorialized, is itself the strict correlate of D. To the point that 

D can be called the creator of the earth—of a new land, a universe, 

not just a reterritorialization.

 

This is the meaning of "absolute." The absolute expresses nothing 

transcendent or undifferentiated. It does not even express a quantity 

that would exceed all given (relative) quantities. It expresses only a 

type of movement qualitatively different from relative movement. A 

movement is absolute when, whatever its quantity and speed, it

 

7      relates "a" body considered as multiple to a smooth space that it and 

occupies in the manner of a vortex. A movement is relative, whatever

 

14  its quantity and speed, when it relates a body considered as One to a 

striated space through which it moves, and which it measures with

 

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CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

 

straight lines, if only virtual. D is negative or relative (yet already 

effective) when it conforms to the second case and operates either by 

principal reterritorializations that obstruct the lines of flight, or by 

secondary reterritorializations that segment and work to curtail 

them. D is absolute when it conforms to the first case and brings 

about the creation of a new earth, in other words, when it connects 

lines of flight, raises them to the power of an abstract vital line, or 

draws a plane of consistency. Now what complicates everything is 

that this absolute D necessarily proceeds by way of relative D, pre-

cisely because it is not transcendent. Conversely, relative or negative 

D itself requires an absolute for its operation: it makes the absolute 

something "encompassing," something totalizing that overcodes the 

earth and then conjugates lines of flight in order to stop them, destroy 

them—rather than connecting them in order to create (it is in this 

sense that we have opposed conjunction to connection, although we 

have often treated them as synonyms from a very general point of 

view). Thus there is a limitative absolute already at work in properly

 

9 negative, or even relative, D's. Above all, at this turning point the 

and lines of flight are not only obstructed or segmented but turn into lines

 

14 of destruction or death. For the stakes here are indeed the negative 

and the positive in the absolute: the earth girded, encompassed,

 

11 overcoded, conjugated as the object of a mortuary and suicidal 

organization surrounding it on all sides, or  the earth consolidated, 

connected with the Cosmos, brought into the Cosmos following lines 

of creation that cut across it as so many becomings (Nietzsche's 

expression: Let the earth become lightness . . .). There are thus at 

least four forms of D that confront and combine, and must be distin-

guished from one another following concrete rules.

 

M

 

Abstract Machines (Diagram and Phylum)

 

There is no abstract machine, or machines, in the sense of a Platonic 

Idea, transcendent, universal, eternal. Abstract machines operate within 

concrete assemblages: They are defined by the fourth aspect of 

assemblages, in other words, the cutting edges of decoding and 11 

deterritorialization. They draw these cutting edges. Therefore they 

make the territorial assemblage open onto something else, assemblages 

of another type, the molecular, the cosmic; they constitute becomings. 

Thus they are always singular and immanent. Contrary to the strata, and 

the assemblages considered under their other aspects,

 

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CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES □ 511

 

abstract machines know nothing of forms and substances. This is what 

makes them abstract, and also defines the concept of the machine in 

the strict sense. They surpass any kind of mechanics. They are 

opposed to the abstract in the ordinary sense. Abstract machines 

consist of unformed matters and nonformal functions. Every abstract 

machine is a consolidated aggregate of matters-5 functions {phylum 

and diagram). This is evident on a technological "plane": such a plane 

is not made up simply of formed substances (aluminum, plastic, 

electric wire, etc.) or organizing forms (program, prototypes, etc.), but 

of a composite of unformed matters exhibiting only degrees of 

intensity (resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed or delay, 

induction, transduction . . .) and diagrammatic functions exhibiting 

only differential equations or, more generally, "tensors." Of course, 

within the dimensions of the assemblage, the abstract machine, or 

machines, is effectuated in forms and substances, in varying states of 

freedom. But the abstract machine must first have composed itself, and 

have simultaneously composed a plane of consistency. Abstract, 

singular, and creative, here and now, real yet nonconcrete, actual yet 

noneffectuated—that is why abstract machines are dated and named 

(the Einstein abstract machine, the Webern abstract machine, but also 

the Galileo, the Bach, or the Beethoven, etc.). Not that they refer to 

people or to effectuating moments; on the contrary, it is the names and 

dates that refer to the singularities of the machines, and to what they 

effectuate.

 

But if abstract machines know nothing of form and substance, 

what happens to the other determination of strata, or even of 

assemblages—content and expression? In a certain sense, it could be 

said that this distinction is also irrelevant to the abstract machine,

 

3  precisely because it no longer has the forms and substances the dis 

tinction requires. The plane of consistency is a plane of continuous 

variation; each abstract machine can be considered a "plateau" of 

variation that places variables of content and expression in continu 

ity. Content and expression thus attain their highest level of relativ 

ity, becoming "functives of one and the same function" or materials 

of a single matter [see 4, "November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguis 

tics," note 21—Trans.]. But in another sense, it could be said that the

 

4  distinction subsists, and is even recreated, on the level oi traits: there 

and are traits of content (unformed matters or intensities) and traits of

 

5  expression (nonformal functions or tensors). Here, the distinction 

has become entirely displaced, or even a different distinction, since it 

now concerns cutting edges of deterritorialization. Absolute deter- 

ritorialization implies a "deterritorializing element" and a "deterri-

 

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CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

 

torialized element," one of which in each case is allocated to expression, 

the other to content, or vice versa, but always in such a way as to convey a 

relative distinction between the two. Thus both content and expression are 

necessarily affected by continuous variation, but it still assigns them two 

dissymmetrical roles as elements of a single becoming, or as quanta of a 

single flow. That is why it is impossible to define a continuous variation 

that would not take in both the content and the expression, rendering 

them indiscernible, while simultaneously proceeding by one or the other, 

determining the two mobile and relative poles of that which has become 

indiscernible. For this reason, one must define both traits or intensities of 

content and traits or ten-1, 2 sors of expression (indefinite article, proper 
name, infinitive, and 
4, 10 date),  which take turns leading one another 

across the plane of consistency. Unformed matter, the phylum, is not 

dead, brute, homo-12 geneous matter, but a matter-movement bearing 

singularities or haecceities, qualities, and even operations (itinerant 

technological lineages); and the nonformal function, the diagram, is not 

an inexpressive metalanguage lacking a syntax, but an 

expressivity-movement always bearing a foreign tongue within each 

language and 4 nonlinguistic categories within language as a whole 

(nomad poetic lineages). One writes, then, on the same level as the real 

of an unformed matter, at the same time as that matter traverses and 

extends all of nonformal language: a becoming-animal like Kafka's

 

10  mouse [p. 243], Hofmannsthal's rats [p. 240], Moritz's calves [p. 

240]? A revolutionary machine, all the more abstract for being real. A 

regime that no longer operates by the signifier or the subjective.

 

That covers singular and immanent abstract machines. What we 

have said does not preclude the possibility of "the" abstract machine 

serving as a transcendent model, under very particular conditions. 

This time the concrete assemblages are related to an abstract idea of 

the Machine and, depending on how they effectuate it, are assigned 

coefficients taking into account their potentialities, their creativity. 

The coefficients that "quantify" assemblages bear on the varying 

assemblage components (territory, deterritorialization, 

reterritori-alization, earth, Cosmos), the various entangled lines 

constituting the "map" of an assemblage (molar lines, molecular 

lines, lines of flight), and the different relations-between the 

assemblage and the plane of consistency (phylum and diagram). For 

example, the "grass stem" component may have different 

coefficients in assemblages of

 

11  animal species that are nevertheless closely related [p. 324-25]. As a 

general rule, an assemblage is all the closer to the abstract machine 

the more lines without contour passing between things it has, and the

 

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CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES □ 513

 

4      more it enjoys a power of metamorphosis (transformation and 

trans-and substantiation) corresponding to the matter-function: cf. The 
Waves 
10 machine [p. 252].

 

We have considered in particular two great alloplastic and anthro-

pomorphic assemblages, the war machine and the State apparatus. 

These two assemblages not only differ in nature but are quantifiable 

in relation to "the" abstract machine in different ways. They do not 

have the same relation to the phylum, the diagram; they do not have 

the same lines, or the same components. This analysis of the two

 

12  assemblages and their coefficients demonstrates that the war ma- 

and chine does not in itself have war for its object, but necessarily adopts it

 

13  as its object when it allows itself to be appropriated by the State appa 

ratus. At this very precise point, the line of flight and the abstract vital 

line it effectuates turn into a line of death and destruction. Hence the 

name war "machine," which is much closer to the abstract machine 

than is the State apparatus, which divests the war machine of its 

power of metamorphosis. Writing and music can be war machines. 

The more an assemblage opens and multiplies connections and draws 

a plane of consistency with its quantifiers of intensities and of consol-

 

1, 4 idation, the closer it is to the living abstract machine. But it strays

 

5, 9 from it to the extent that it replaces creative connections with con-

 

12 junctions causing blockages (axiomatics), organizations forming

 

and strata (stratometers), reterritorializations forming black holes

 

14  (segmentometers), and conversions into lines of death (deleometers). 

Thus there is a whole process of selection of assemblages according to 

their ability to draw a plane of consistency with an increasing number 

of connections. Schizoanalysis is not only a qualitative analysis of 

abstract machines in relation to the assemblages, but also a quantita 

tive analysis of the assemblages in relation to a presumably pure 

abstract machine.

 

There is one last point of view, that of typological analysis. For 

there exist general types of abstract machines. The abstract machine or 

machines of the plane of consistency do not exhaust or dominate the 

entirety of the operations that constitute the strata and even the 

assemblages. The strata "take" on the plane of consistency itself, 

forming areas of thickening, coagulations, and belts organized and 

developing along the axes of another plane (substance-form, content-3 

expression). This means that each stratum has a unity of consistency 

or of composition relating above all to substantial elements and formal 

traits, and testifying to the existence of a properly stratic abstract 

machine presiding over this other plane. And there is a third type: on 

the alloplastic strata, which are particularly propitious for the assem-

 

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514 □ CONCLUSION: CONCRETE RULES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES

 

blages, there arise abstract machines that compensate for deterritori-9     

alizations with reterritorializations, and especially for decodings with 

overcodings or overcoding equivalents. We have seen in particular that if 

abstract machines open assemblages they also close them. 4, 7 An 

order-word machine overcodes language, a faciality machine and 

overcodes the body and even the head, a machine of enslavement 8     

overcodes or axiomatizes the earth: these are in no way illusions, but real 

machinic effects. We can no longer place the assemblages on a 

quantitative scale measuring how close or far they are from the plane of 

consistency. There are different types of abstract machines that overlap 

in their operations and qualify the assemblages: abstract machines of 

consistency, singular and mutant, with multiplied connections; abstract 

machines of stratification that surround the plane 5      of consistency 

with another plane; and axiomatic or overcoding and abstract machines 

that perform totalizations, homogenizations, con-13 junctions of closure. 

Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only 

because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, 

ecological, cosmic—perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and 

semiotic—but because their various types are as intertwined as their 

operations are convergent. Mechanosphere.

 

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Notes

 

 

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Notes

 

Translator's Foreword

 

1.  Gilles Deleuze, in Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977; 

forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press), p. 10. 

2.  Gilles Deleuze, interview with Catherine Clement, L'Arc, no. 49 (revised ed., 1980), 

p. 99. 

3.  Gilles Deleuze, "Nomad Thought," in The New Nietzsche, ed. Donald B. Allison 

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 148. Semiotext(e), Nietzsche's Return 3,1 (1978), 

p. 20. 

4.  Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 20. On the relationship between philosophy and 

the State, see also pp. 351-473 of the present work. Deleuze develops an extended critique of 

rationalist philosophy in Difference et repetition (Paris: PUF, 1968); see especially, "LTmage 

de la pensee," pp. 169-217. 

5.  Deleuze, "I Have Nothing to Admit," trans. Janis Forman, Semiotext(e), 

Anti-Oedipus 2, 3 (1977), p. 12 (translation modified). 

6.  "What I detested more than anything else was Hegelianism and the Dialectic" (ibid). 

7.  Ibid. 

8.  See Deleuze's discussion with Michel Foucault, "Intellectuals and Power," in 

Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell 

University Press, 1977), pp. 205-217. 

9.  Deleuze, "I Have Nothing to Admit," p. 113. 

 

10.  Felix Guattari, "Sur les rapports infirmiers-medecins" (1955), in Psychanalyse et 

transversalite (Paris: Maspero, 1972), p. 11. 

11.  Guattari,  Psychanalyse et transversalite, pp. 40, 173n, 288-289. The journal Re-

cherches, of which Guattari was an editor, was the mouthpiece of the institutional analysis 

movement. 

12.  Uneasy because Guattari believed that Laing's communitarian solution reconsti-

tuted an extended Oedipal family (La Revolution moleculaire, [Paris: Editions Recherches, 

517

 

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518 D NOTES TO PP. xi-10

 

1977], p. 121), and because he was critical of Basaglia's assimilation of mental illness and 
social alienation and his rejection of any kind of institutions for the insane (Psychanalyse et 
transversalite, 
p. 264).

 

13.  In 1973, Guattari was tried and fined for committing an "outrage to public decency" 

by publishing an issue ofRecherches on homosexuality. All copies were ordered destroyed (La 
Revolution moleculaire, 
p. 1 lOn). 

14.  Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: 

University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 

15.  La Revolution moleculaire, p. 144. The disintegration of the Left into dogmatic 

"groupuscules" and the amoeba-like proliferation of Lacanian schools based on personality 
cults confirmed the charge of bureaucratism but belied the potency of the mix. Guattari him-
self began his political life in the early 1950s with stormy attempts at membership in two 
Trotskyist splinter parties (Psychanalyse et transversalite, pp. 268-271). 

16.  Difference et repetition, pp. 49-55, 337-349. 
17.  Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. 

Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 
pp. 32-33. 

18.  Jurgen Habermas's notion of "consensus" is the updated, late-modern version. 
19.  Interview with Gilles Deleuze, Liberation, October 23, 1980, p. 16. 
20.  See Foucault's essay on Blanchot, often quoted by Deleuze: "The Thought from Out-

side," in Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel Foucault 
(New York: Zone Books, 1987). 

21.  Deleuze's books on cinema (Cinema I: The Movement-Image [Minneapolis: Univer-

sity of Minnesota Press, 1986], and Cinema II: The Time-Image [forthcoming from Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press]) and on painting (Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation [Paris: Ed. 
de la Difference, 1981 ]) are not meant as exercises in philosophical expansionism. Their proj-
ect is not to bring these arts to philosophy, but to bring out the philosophy already in them. 

22.  The terms "smooth space" and "striated space" were in fact coined by Pierre Boulez. 

See p. 361-62 of the present work and note 20. 

23.  Interview with Gilles Deleuze, Liberation, October 23, 1980, p. 17. 
24.  See page 158 of the present work and note. 
25.  On style in literature, see Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New 

York: Braziller, 1972), pp. 142-150. 

26.  Deleuze and Foucault, "Intellectuals and Power," p. 208. 

1. Introduction: Rhizome

 

1.  [

TRANS

:

 

U. Weinreich, W. Labov, and M. Herzog, "Empirical Foundations for a The-

ory of Language," in W. Lehmann and Y. Malkeiel, eds., Directions for Historical Linguistics 

(1968), p. 125; cited by Francoise Robert, "Aspects sociaux du changement dans une 

grammaire generative," Langages, no. 32 (December 1973), p. 90.] 

2.  Bertil Malmberg, New Trends in Linguistics, trans. Edward Carners (Stockholm: 

Lund, 1964), pp. 65-67 (the example of the Castilian dialect). 

3.  Ernst Jiinger, Approches; drogues et ivresse (Paris: Table Ronde, 1974), p. 304, 

sec. 218. 

4.  Remy Chauvin in Entretiens sur la sexualit'e, ed. Max Aron, Robert Courrier, and 

Etienne Wolff (Paris: Plon, 1969), p. 205. 

5.  On the work of R. E. Benveniste and G. J. Todaro, see Yves Christen, "Le role des 

virus dans 1'evolution," La Recherche, no. 54 (March 1975): "After integration-extraction in a 

cell, viruses may, due to an error in excision, carry off fragments of their host's DNA and 

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NOTES TO PP. 10-17 D 519

 

transmit them to new cells: this in fact is the basis for what we call 'genetic engineering.' As a 
result, the genetic information of one organism may be transferred to another by means of 
viruses. We could even imagine an extreme case where this transfer of information would go 
from a more highly evolved species to one that is less evolved or was the progenitor of the more 
evolved species. This mechanism, then, would run in the opposite direction to evolution in 
the classical sense. If it turns out that this kind of transferral of information has played a major 
role, we would in certain cases have to substitute reticular schemas (with communications 
between branches after they have become differentiated) for the bush or tree schemas currently 
used to represent evolution" 
(p. 271).

 

6.  Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. Betty E. Spillmann (New York: Pantheon, 

1973), pp. 291-292, 311 (quote). 

7.  Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley: University of California 

Press, 1971), p. 88. 

8.  Pierre Boulez, Conversations with C'elestin Deliege(London: Eulenberg Books, 1976): 

"a seed which you plant in compost, and suddenly it begins to proliferate like a weed" (p. 15); 
and on musical proliferation: "a music that floats, and in which the writing itself makes it 
impossible for the performer to keep in with a pulsed time" (p. 69 [translation modified]). 

9.  See Melanie Klein, Narrative of a Child Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1961): the 

role of war maps in Richard's activities, [

TRANS

:

 

Deleuze and Guattari, with Claire Parnet and 

Andre Scala, analyze Klein's Richard and Freud's Little Hans in "The Interpretation of 
Utterances," in Language, Sexuality and Subversion, trans. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris 
(Sydney: Feral Publications, 1978), pp. 141-157.] 

 

10.  Fernand Deligny, Cahiers de Vimmuable, vol. 1, Voix et voir, Recherches, no. 8 

(April 1975). 

11.  See Dieter Wunderlich, "Pragmatique, situation d'enonciation et Deixis," in 

Langages, no. 26 (June 1972), pp. 50ff.: MacCawley, Sadock, and Wunderlich's attempts to 
integrate "pragmatic properties" into Chomskian trees. 

12.  Steven Rose, The Conscious Brain (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 76; on memory, see 

pp. 185-219. 

13.  See Julien Pacotte, Le r'eseau arborescent, scheme primordial de la pens'ee (Paris: 

Hermann, 1936). This book analyzes and develops various schemas of the arborescent form, 
which is presented not as a mere formalism but as the "real foundation of formal thought." It 
follows classical thought through to the end. It presents all of the forms of the "One-Two," the 
theory of the dipole. The set, trunk-roots-branches, yields the following schema: 

 

opposed 

t

 segment

 

More recently, Michel Serres has analyzed varieties and sequences of trees in the most diverse 

scientific domains: how a tree is formed on the basis of a "network." La traduction (Paris: 

Minuit, 1974), pp. 27ff.; Feux et signaux de brume (Paris: Grasset, 1975), pp. 35ff.

 

14.  Pierre Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, "Automate asocial et systemes acentres," Com-

munications, no. 22 (1974), pp. 45-62. On the friendship theorem, see Herbert S. Wilf, The 
Friendship Theorem in Combinatorial Mathematics 
(Welsh Academic Press); and on a simi-

lar kind of theorem, called the theorem of group indecision, see Kenneth J. Arrow, Social 
Choice and Individual Values 
(New York: Wiley, 1963). 

15.  Rosenstiehl and Petitot, "Automate asocial." The principal characteristic of the 

acentered system is that local initiatives are coordinated independently of a central power, 

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520 □ NOTES TO PP. 17-24

 

with the calculations made throughout the network (multiplicity). "That is why the only place 

files on people can be kept is right in each person's home, since they alone are capable of filling 

in the description and keeping it up to date: society itself is the only possible data bank on peo-

ple. A naturally acentered society rejects the centralizing automaton as an asocial intrusion" 

(p. 62). On the "Firing Squad Theorem," see pp. 51-57. It even happens that generals, dream-

ing of appropriating the formal techniques of guerrilla warfare, appeal to multiplicities "of 

synchronous modules ... based on numerous but independent lightweight cells" having in 

theory only a minimum of central power and "hierarchical relaying"; see Guy Brossollet, 
Essai surla non-bataille (Paris: Belin, 1975).

 

16.  On Western agriculture of grain plants and Eastern horticulture of tubers, the opposi-

tion between sowing of seeds and replanting of offshoots, and the contrast to animal raising, 

see Andre Haudricourt, "Domestication des animaux, culture des plantes et traitement 

d'autrui," L'Homme, vol. 2, no. 1 (January-April 1962), pp. 40-50, and "Nature et culture 

dans la civilisation de l'igname: l'origine des clones et des clans," L'Homme, vol. 4, no. 1 

(January-April 1964), pp. 93-104. Maize and rice are no exception: they are cereals "adopted 

at a late date by tuber cultivators" and were treated in a similar fashion; it is probable that rice 

"first appeared as a weed in taro ditches." 

17.  Henry Miller, in Henry Miller and Michael Fraenkel, Hamlet (New York: Carrefour, 

1939), pp. 105-106. 

18.  See Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day, 

1968). This book contains a fine analysis of geography and its role in American mythology 

and literature, and of the reversal of directions. In the East, there was the search for a specifi-

cally American code and for a recoding with Europe (Henry James, Eliot, Pound, etc.); in the 

South, there was the overcoding of the slave system, with its ruin and the ruin of the planta-

tions during the Civil War (Faulkner, Caldwell); from the North came capitalist decoding 

(Dos Passos, Dreiser); the West, however, played the role of a line of flight combining travel, 

hallucination, madness, the Indians, perceptive and mental experimentation, the shifting of 

frontiers, the rhizome (Ken Kesey and his "fog machine," the beat generation, etc.). Every 

great American author creates a cartography, even in his or her style; in contrast to what is 

done in Europe, each makes a map that is directly connected to the real social movements 

crossing America. An example is the indexing of geographical directions throughout the work 

of Fitzgerald. 

19.  [

TRANS

:

 

Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University 

Press, 1957).] 

20.  Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 

113. It will be noted that the word "plateau" is used in classical studies of bulbs, tubers, and 

rhizomes; see the entry for "Bulb" in M. H. Baillon, Dictionnaire de botanique (Paris: 

Hachette, 1876-1892). 

21.  For example, Joelle de La Casiniere, Absolument necessaire. The Emergency Book 

(Paris: Minuit, 1973), a truly nomadic book. In the same vein, see the research in progress at 

the Montfaucon Research Center. 

22.  The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken, 

1948), p. 12. 

23.  Marcel Schwob, The Children's Crusade, trans. Henry Copley (Boston: Small, 

Maynard, 1898); JersyAndrzejewski,Lesp0rtesdwpararfzs(Paris:Gallimard, 1959);Armand 

Farrachi, La dislocation (Paris: Stock, 1974). It was in the context of Schwob's book that Paul 

Alphandery remarked that literature, in certain cases, could revitalize history and impose 

upon it "genuine research directions"; La chr'etiente et I'id'ee de croisade (Paris: Albin Michel, 

1959), vol. 2, p. 116. 

24.  See Paul Virilio, "Vehiculaire," in Nomades et vagabonds, ed. Jacques Bergue (Paris: 

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NOTES TO PP. 24-47 D 521

 

Union Generale d'Editions, 1975), p. 43, on the appearance of linearity and the disruption of 
perception by speed.

 

25. See Jean-Cristophe Bailly's description of movement in German Romanticism, in his 

introduction to La legende dispers'ee. Anthologie du romantisme allemand (Paris: Union 
Generale d'Editions, 1976), pp. 18ff.

 

2.1914: One or Several Wolves?

 

1.  Sigmund Freud, Papers on Metapsychology, vol. 14, Standard Edition, trans. James 

Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 200. 

2.  [

TRANS

:

 

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 

1925), p. 11).] 

3.  E. A. Bennet, What Jung Really Said (New York: Schocken, 1967), p. 74. 
4.  Ruth Mack Brunswick, "A Supplement to Freud's History of an Infantile Neurosis," 

in The Wolf-Man, ed. Muriel Gardiner (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 268. 

5.  Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 

pp. 29-30, 93ff. Some of the distinctions mentioned here are noted by Canetti. 

6.  [

TRANS

:

 

Ibid., p. 93.] 

7.  Letter cited by Roland Jaccard, L'homme aux loups (Paris: Ed. Universitaires, 1973), 

p. 113. 

3.10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals

 

1.  Roland Omnes, L'univers et ses metamorphoses (Paris: Hermann, 1973), p. 164: "A 

star that has collapsed so far that its radius has fallen below the critical point becomes what is 
called a black hole (an occluded star). This expression means that nothing sent in the direction 
of such an object will ever come back. It is therefore perfectly black since it does not emit or 
reflect any light." 

2.  Marcel Griaule, Dieu d'eau (Paris: Fayard, 1975), pp. 38-41. 
3.  For a general treatment of the two aspects of morphogenesis, see Raymod Ruyer, La 

genese de formes vivantes (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), pp. 54ff., and Pierre Vendryes, Vie et 
probability (Paris: 
Albin Michel, 1945). Vendryes analyzes the role of the articulatory relation 
and articulated systems. On the two structural aspects of protein, see Jacques Monod, Chance 
and Necessity, 
trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage, 1972), pp. 90-95. 

4.  Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. Betty E. Spillman (New York: Pantheon, 

1973), pp. 269-270 [translation modified]. 

5.  Francois Jacob, "Ix modelelinguistique enbiologie,"Cn7/(7«e, no. 322 (March 1974), 

p. 202: "Genetic material has two roles: it must be reproduced in order to be transmitted to 
the following generation, and it must be expressed in order for it to determine the organism's 
structures and functions." 

6.  Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield 

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 60. 

7.  See Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Principes de philosophie zoologique (Paris: Picton et 

Didier, 1830), which quotes extracts from the debate with Cuvier; and Notions 
synthe-tiques, historiques et physiologiques de philosophie naturelle 
(Paris: Denain, 
1838), in which Geoffroy sets forth his molecular conception of combustion, 
electrification, and attraction. Karl Ernest von Baer, Uber Entwicklungsgeschichte der 
Thiere 
(Konigsberg: Beiden Gehrudern Borntrager, 1828-88), and "Biographie de Cuvier," 
in Annales des sciences naturelles (1908). Vialleton, Membres et ceintures des vertebres 
tetrapodes 
(Paris: Doin, 1924). 

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522 □ NOTES TO PP. 48-62

 

8.  Edmond Perrier deserves a place, although not a decisive one, in this long history. 

He returned to the problem of unity of composition, updating the work of Geoffroy with 

the aid of Darwin, and especially Lamarck. Perrier's entire work is organized around two 

themes: animal colonies or multiplicities, and the speeds necessary to account for het-

erodox degrees and foldings ("tachygenesis"). For example, the brain of a vertebrate may 

come to occupy the position of the mouth of an annelid, in the "fight between the mouth 

and the brain." See Les colonies animates et la formation des organismes (Paris: G. 

Mas-son, 1881), and "L'origine des embranchements du regne animal," Scienta 

(May-June 1918). Perrier wrote a history entitled Philosophie zoologique avant Darwin 

(Paris: Alcan, 1884), which includes excellent chapters on Geoffroy and Cuvier. 

9.  Georges Canguilhem et al., "Du developpement a revolution au XIXe siecle," Thales 

(1960), p. 34. 

 

10.  George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 1950). 

11.  Gilbert Simondon, L'individu et sa genese physico-biologique(Paris: PUF, 1964). On 

the interior and exterior in the crystal and the organism, and on the role of the limit or mem-

brane, see pp. 107-114 and 259-264. 

12.  J. H. Rush, The Dawn of Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover House, 1957), p. 165: 

"Primitive organisms lived, in some sense, in a state of suffocation. Life had been born, but it 

had not yet begun to breathe." 

13.  Jakob Johann von Uexkiill, Mondes animaux et monde humain (Paris: Gonthier, 1965). 

14.  See Pia Laviosa-Zambotti, Origini e diffusione della civilita (Milan: C. Marzorati, 

1947): her use of the notions of strata, substratum, and parastratum (although she does not 

define the last.) 

15.  Jacob,  The Logic of Life, pp. 290-292, 310-312, and what Remy Chauvin calls 

"aparallel evolution." 

16.  See Laviosa-Zambotti, Origini: her conception of waves and flows from center to 

periphery, and of nomadism and migrations (nomadic flows). 

17.  On phenomena of resonance between different orders of magnitude, see Simondon, 

L 'individu, pp. 16-20, 124-131, and passim. 

18.  Claude Popelin, Le taureau et son combat (Paris: Julliard, 1981): see chapter 4 on the 

problem of human and bull territories inside the arena. 

19.  See Simondon, L'individu, on orders of magnitude and the establishment of reso-

nance between them; actions of the "mold," "modulation," and "modeling" types; and exte-

rior forces and intermediate states. 

20.  Obviously there is a multiplicity of sequences or lines. But that does not preclude the 

"order of order" being unilinear (see Jacob, The Logic of Life, p. 286, and "Le modele 

linguistique en biologie," pp. 199-203). 

21.  On the respective independence of proteins and nucleic acids, and their reciprocal 

presupposition, see Jacob, The Logic of Life, pp. 304-306, and Jacques Monod, Chance and 
Necessity, 
pp. 96-98, 107-109, 114-115, and 142-144. 

22.  On the notion of transduction, see Simondon, L'individu,  pp. 18-21 (however, he 

takes the word in its most general sense and uses it to refer to the entire system). On the mem-

brane, see pp. 259ff. 

23.  Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, vol. 1, of Technique et langage (Paris: 

Albin Michel, 1964), p. 161. 

24.  On all of these problems (the free hand, the supple larynx, the lips, and the role of the 

steppe as factors of deterritorialization), see Emile Devaux's fine book, Trois problemes: 
Tespece, I'inslinct, I'homme 
(Paris: Le Francois, 1933), part 3 (chapter 7: "The anthropoid, 

severed from the forest, retarded in its development, infantilized, had to acquire free hands 

background image

 

NOTES TO PP. 62-77 □ 523

 

and a supple larynx"; and chapter 9: "The forest made the monkey, the cave and the steppe 
made the human").

 

25.  Jacob, The Logic of Life, pp. 278,289-290,298. Jacob and Monod sometimes use the 

word "translation" for the genetic code, but only for reasons of convenience. As Monod points 
out, "The code can be translated only by products of translation." 

26.  Leroi-Gourhan, Legesteet la parole, pp. 269-275. 
27.  [

TRANS

:

 

A reference to the work of Julia Kristeva. On the chora, see Kristeva, Revolu-

tion in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 
1984), pp. 25-30.] 

28.  That is why we consider Hjelmslev, despite his own reservations and vacillations, to 

be the only linguist to have actually broken with the signifier and the signified. Many other lin-
guists seem to make this break deliberately and without reservations, but retain the implicit 
presuppositions of the signifier. 

29.  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vin-

tage, 1975). Already in The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New 
York: Pantheon, 1982), Foucault outlines his theory of the two kinds of multiplicities, multi-
plicities of expression or statements and multiplicities of contents or objects. He shows that 
they are irreducible to the signifier-signified couple. He also explains why the title of one of 
his earlier books, Les mots et les choses [Words and Things, translated as The Order of Things 
(New York: Vintage, 1970)], must be understood negatively (pp. 48-49). 

30.  [

TRANS

:

 

Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 9.] 

31.  Simondon, L'individu, pp. 139-141. 
32.  H. P. Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," in The Dream-Quest of 

Unknown Kadath (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), pp. 168, 217-218. 

4. November 20,1923: Postulates of Linguistics

 

1.  [

TRANS

:

 

Mot d'ordre: in standard French, "slogan," (military) "password." Deleuze 

and Guattari are also using the term literally: "word of order," in the double sense of a word or 

phrase constituting a command and a word or phrase creative of order] 

2.  Georges Darien, L'epaulette (Paris: 10/18, 1973), p. 435. Or Zola, La BeteHumaine, 

trans. Leonard Tancock (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 148: "She was saying this not to con-

vince him, but solely to warn him that she had to be innocent in the eyes of the world at large." 

This type of phrase seems to us to be much more characteristic of the novel in general than the 

informational phrase, "the marquess went out at five o'clock." 

3.  Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: 

Knopf, 1932), p. 54 [translation modified]. 

4.  Brice Parain, Sur la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1953). Parain develops a theory of 

"supposition" or the presupposed in language in relation to the orders given to life; but he sees 

this less as a power in the political sense than a duty in the moral sense. 

5.  Two authors in particular have brought out the importance of indirect discourse, espe-

cially in its so-called free form, from the viewpoint of a theory of enunciation that goes beyond 

the traditional categories of linguistics: V. N. Volosinov (for Russian, German, and French), 
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language [attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin in the French edi-

tion cited by the authors—

TRANS

],

 

trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. (Cambridge, 

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), Part 3, "Toward a History of Forms and Utterance in 

Language Constructions," pp. 109-200; Pier Paolo Pasolini (for Italian), Vexperience 
heretique 
(Paris: Payot, 1976), part 1. We have also referred to an unpublished study by J.-P. 

Bamberger, "Les formes du discours indirect dans le cinema, muet et parlant." 

6.  Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek 

background image

 

524 □ NOTES TO PP. 77-82

 

(Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 53: "There is no indication, for 

example, that a bee goes off to another hive with the message it has received in its own hive. 

This would constitute a kind of transmission or relay."

 

7.  William Labov has clearly shown the contradiction, or at least paradox, created by the 

distinction between language and speech: language is defined as the "social part" of language, 

and speech is consigned to individual variations; but since the social part is self-enclosed, it 

necessarily follows that a single individual would be enough to illustrate the principles of lan-

guage, without reference to any outside data, whereas speech could only be studied in a social 

context. The same paradox recurs from Saussure to Chomsky: "The social aspect of language 

is studied by observing any one individual, but the individual aspect only by observing lan-

guage in its social context"; Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns (Philadelphia: University of Penn-

sylvania Press, 1972), p. 186. 

8.  Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, part 4 ("Man and Language"); on the 

elimination of the illocutionary, see pp. 237-238. 

9.  Oswald Ducrot, Dire et nepas dire (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 70-80, and "De Saus-

sure a la philosophie du langage," preface to the French translation of S. R. Searle's Speech 
Acts, Actes de langage 
(Paris: Hermann, 1972). Ducrot challenges the notions of linguistic 

information and code, and communication and subjectivity. He develops a theory of "linguistic 

presupposition" or nondiscursive implicitness, as opposed to concluded and discursive 

implicitness still referring to a code. He constructs a pragmatics covering all of linguistics and 

moves toward a study of assemblages of enunciation, considered from a "juridical," "polemi-

cal," or "political" point of view. 

 

10.  Bakhtin and Labov have stressed the social character of enunciation, in different 

ways. They are consequently in opposition not only to subjectivism but also to structuralism, 

to the extent that the latter ties the system of language to the understanding of an ideal indi-

vidual, and social factors to actual individuals as speakers. 

11.  Ducrot, Dire et nepas dire, p. 77: "To qualify an action as criminal (theft, fraud, black-

mail, etc.) is not, in our sense of the term, to present it as an act since the legal situation of guilt, 

which defines a crime, is supposed to derive from other given consequences of the activity 

described: the activity is considered punishable because it is harmful to another person, to 

order, to society, etc. The judge's statement of a sentence can, on the other hand, be consid-

ered a juridical act because there is no intervening effect between the speech of the judge and 

the transformation of the accused into a convict." 

12.  John Kenneth Galbraith, Money (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), chapter 12, "The 

Ultimate Inflation": "On November 20, 1923, the curtain was rolled down. As in Austria a 

year earlier, the end came suddenly. As with the milder French inflation, the end came with 

astonishing ease. Perhaps it ended simply because it could not go on. On November 20, the 

old reichsmark was declared to be no longer money. A new currency, the rentenmark, was 

introduced .... The new rentenmark was declared to be backed by a first mortgage on all the 

land and other physical assets of the Reich. This idea had its ancestry in the assignats; it was, 

however, appreciably more fraudulent [Galbraith means to say 'deterritorialized'—Au.]. In 

France in 1789, there was extant, visible land freshly taken from the church for which cur-

rency initially could be exchanged; any German seeking to exercise rights of foreclosure on 

German property with his rentenmarks would have been thought mentally unstable. Never-

theless, it worked. Circumstances helped.. . .  If, after 1923, the previous claims on the Ger-

man budget had continued—the reparations claims and the cost of passive resistance— 

nothing would have saved the mark and [the head of the Reichsbank's] reputation"; pp. 159, 

161. 

13.  Volosinov [Bakhtin], Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, p. 110. And on 

"symbolic relations of force" as variables internal to enunciation, see Pierre Bourdieu, 

background image

 

NOTES TO PP. 82-91 □ 525

 

"L'economie des echanges linguistiques," in Linguistique et sociolinguistique, Langue 
Francaise, 
May 1977, pp. 18-21.

 

14.  The very notion of the proletarian class hinges on the question, Does the proletariat 

already exist at a given moment, and if so as a body? (Or, does it still exist?) It is evident that 

Marxists use it in an anticipatory sense, as, for example, when they speak of an "embryonic 

proletariat." 

15.  [

TRANS

:

 

V. I. Lenin, "On Slogans," Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 

1975), vol. 3, p. 148.] 

16.  Quoted by David Cooper, The Language of Madness (London: Allen Lane, 1978), p. 

34. Cooper comments that "the language of 'hearing voices' ... means that one becomes 

aware of something that exceeds the consciousness of normal [i.e., direct] discourse and 

which therefore must be experienced as 'other'" (p. 34). 

17.  Elias Canetti is one of the rare authors who has dealt with the psychological mode of 

action of the order-word, or "command": Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New 

York: Viking Press, 1963), pp. 303-333. He hypothesizes that an order inflicts a kind of sting 

on the soul, which forms a cyst, a hardening that never goes away. When this happens, the 

only way to find relief is to pass it on to others as quickly as possible, to "massify," even 

though the mass may turn back against the emitter of the order-word. In addition, the fact 

that the order-word is like a foreign body within the body, an indirect discourse within 

speech, explains the extraordinary forgetting that occurs: "The person who carries out a 

command. . . does not accuse himself, but the sting: this is the true culprit, whom he carries 

with him everywhere.... It is his permanent witness that it was not he himself who perpe-

trated a given wrong. He sees himself as its victim and thus has no feeling left for the real vic-

tim. It is true, therefore, that people who have acted on orders can feel entirely guiltless," 

making it all the easier for them to move on to other order-words (p. 332). This provides a 

profound explanation for the Nazis' feeling of innocence, or for the capacity of forgetfulness 

displayed by old Stalinists, whose amnesia worsens the more they invoke their memory and 

past in order to claim the right to follow new and even more insidious order-words—"sting 

mania." In this respect, Canetti's analysis seems essential. However, it presupposes the exis-

tence of a very particular psychic faculty in the absence of which the order-word would not 

have this mode of action. The whole classical rationalist theory—of "common sense," of 

universally shared good sense based on information and communication—is a way to cover 

up or hide, and to justify in advance, a much more disturbing faculty, that of order-words. 

This singularly irrational faculty is best safeguarded by gracing it with the name of pure rea-

son, by saying that it is nothing but pure reason ... 

18.  See Emile Brehier's classic study, La theorie des incorporels dans I'ancien stdicisme 

(Paris: Vrin, 1970). On "the knife cuts the flesh" and "the tree turns green," see pp. 12 and 20. 

19.  [

TRANS

:

 

Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1976), 

P- 12.] 

20.  [

TRANS

:

 

Kafka, "The Stoker," chapter 1 of Amerika, trans. Edwin Muir (Norfolk, 

Conn.: New Directions, 1940.] 

21.  Stalin, in his famous text on linguistics [Marxism and Linguistics (New York: Inter-

national Publishers, 1951)—Trans.], claims to identify two neutral forms serving all of soci-

ety, all classes, and all regimes equally: instruments and machines as pure means of 

production of goods, and language as a pure means of information and communication. 

Even Bakhtin defines language as the form of ideology, but he specifies that the form of ide-

ology is not itself ideological. 

22.  On these problems, see J. M. Sadock, "Hypersentences" (Diss. University of Illinois, 

1968); Dieter Wunderlich, "Pragmatique, situation d'enonciation et Deixis," Langages, no. 

36 (June 1972), pp. 34-58; and especially S. K. Saumjan, "Aspects algebriques de la gram- 

background image

 

526 □ NOTES TO PP. 91-99

 

maire applicative," Langages, no. 33 (March 1974), pp. 95-122. Saumjan proposes a model of 

abstract objects based on the operation of application called AGM (applicative generative 

model). He cites Hjelmslev as an influence; Hjelmslev's strength is to have conceived of the 

form of expression and the form of content as two entirely relative variables on one and the 

same plane, as "functives of one and the same function," Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory 
of Language, 
trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison; University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 

This advance toward a diagrammatic conception of the abstract machine is, however, coun-

teracted by the fact that Hjelmslev still conceives the distinction between expression and con-

tent in the signifier-signified mode and therefore retains the subordination of the abstract 

machine to linguistics.

 

23.  See Herbert Brekle, Semantique (Paris: A. Colin, 1974), pp. 94-104, on the idea of a 

universal pragmatics and of "universals of dialogue." 

24.  On this budding and various representations of it, see Wunderlich, "Pragmatique, sit-

uation d'enonciation et Deixis." 

25.  Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility. Based on Conversations with Mitsou 

Ronat, trans. John Viertel (New York: Pantheon, 1979), pp. 53-55. 

26.  William Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns, especially pp. 187-190. It will be noted that 

Labov at times limits himself to statements that have approximately the same meaning and at 

other times disregards this condition in order to follow a sequence of complementary but het-

erogeneous statements. 

27.  [

TRANS

:

 

This is a phrase from Proust's Time Regained in Remembrance of Things 

Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Ran-

dom House, 1981), vol. 3, p. 905 (vol. 3, p. 872, in the French "Pleiade" edition). See Deleuze, 
Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Braziller, 1972), pp. 59-60.] 

28.  This is indeed how Labov tends to define his notion of "optional or variable rules," as 

opposed to constant rules: not simply an observed frequency, but a specific quantity express-

ing the probability of the frequency or the application of the rule. See Language in the Inner 
City 
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp. 94ff. 

29.  See Gilbert Rouget's article, "Un chromatisme africain," in L'Homme, vol. 1, no. 3 

(September-December 1961), pp. 32-46 (this issue comes with a recording of ritual chants of 

Dahomey). 

30.  Gherasim Luca, Le chant de la carpe (Paris: Soleil Noir, 1973), and the recording put 

out by Givaudan, on which Luca recites the poem "Passionnement." 

31.  [

TRANS

:

 

See Carmelo Bene and Gilles Deleuze, Superpositions (Paris: Minuit, 1979). 

Forthcoming in English translation from Semiotext(e).] 

32.  "And" has an especially important role in English literature, as a function not only of 

the Old Testament but also of the "minorities" at work on the language: one case in point is J. 

M. Synge (see Francois Regnault's remarks on coordination in Anglo-Irish in the French 

translation of Playboy of the Western World, Baladin du monde occidental [Paris: 

Biblio-theque du Graphe]). It should not be thought adequate to analyze the "and" as a 

conjunction; rather, "and" is a special form of every possible conjunction and brings into play a 

logic of language. Jean Wahl's works contain profound reflections on this sense of "and," on 

the way it challenges the primacy of the verb "to be." 

33.  Hjelmslev, Language: An Introduction, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: Univer-

sity of Wisconsin Press, 1970), pp. 39ff. 

34.  Nicolas Ruwet, "Parallelisme et deviations en poesie," in Langue, discours, societe. 

Pour Emile Benveniste, ed. Julia Kristeva, Nicolas Ruwet, and Jean-Claude Milner (Paris: 

Seuil, 1975). Ruwet analyzes Poem 29 in Cummings's Fifty Poems (New York: Duell, Sloan 

and Pearce, 1940); he gives a restricted and structuralist interpretation of this phenomenon of 

variation, invoking the notion of parallelism; in other texts, he minimizes the importance of 

background image

 

NOTES TO PP. 99-106 □ 527

 

these variations, treating them as marginal exercises irrelevant to true changes in language; 

still, his comments seem to us to transcend all of these interpretive restrictions.

 

35.  See Vidal Sephiha, "Introduction a l'etude de l'intensif," Langages, no. 29 (March 

1973). This is one of the first studies of the atypical tensions and variations of language, par-

ticularly as they appear in so-called minor languages. 

36.  On the expansion and diffusion of states of language, in the "patch of oil" mode or the 

"paratrooper" mode, see Bertil Malmberg, New Trends in Linguistics, trans. Edward Carners 

(Stockholm: Lund, 1964), chapter 3 (which uses N. Lindqvist's important studies on dialect). 

What are needed now are comparative studies of how homogenizations and centralizations of 

given major languages take place. In this respect, the linguistic history of French is not at all 

the same as that of English; neither is their relation to writing as a form of homogenization the 

same. For French, the centralized language par excellence, one may refer to the analysis of 

Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue (Paris: 

Gallimard, 1975). The analysis covers a very brief period at the end of the eighteenth century, 

focusing on Abbot Gregory, and notes two distinct periods: one in which the central language 

opposed the rural dialects, just as the town opposed the countryside, and the capital the prov-

inces; and another in which it opposed "feudal idioms," as well as the language of the emigres, 

just as the Nation opposes everything that is foreign to it, an enemy of it (pp. 160ff: "It is also 

obvious that the rejection of the dialects resulted from a technical inability to grasp stable 

laws in regional speech patterns"). 

37.  See Michel Lalonde, Change, no. 30 (March 1977), pp. 100-122, where the poem, 

"Speak White," quoted in text, appears, along with a manifesto on the Quebecois language 

("La deffense et illustration de la langue quebecqoyse"). 

38.  On the complex situation of Afrikaans, see Breyten Breytenbach's fine book, Feu 

Froid (Paris: Bourgois, 1976); G. M. Lory's study (pp. 101-107) elucidates Breytenbach's 

project, the violence of his poetic treatment of the language, and his will to be a "bastard, with 

a bastard language." 

39.  On the double aspect of minor language, poverty-ellipsis, and overload-variation, one 

may refer to a certain number of exemplary studies: Klauss Wagenbach's study of the German 

of Prague at the beginning of the twentieth century (Franz Kafka. Eine Biographie seiner 
Jugend  
[Bern: Francke, 1958]); Pasolini's study demonstrating that Italian was not con-

structed on the basis of a new standard or mean, but exploded in two simultaneous directions, 

"upward and downward," in other words, toward simplified material and expressive exagger-

ation (L'experience heretique, pp. 46-47); J. L. Dillard's study bringing out the double ten-

dency of Black English on the one hand to omit, lose, disencumber, and on the other to 

overload, to develop "fancy talk" {Black English [New York: Random House, 1972]). As 

Dillard notes, there is no inferiority to the standard language; instead there is a correlation 

between two movements that necessarily escape from the standard level of language. Still on 

the topic of Black English, LeRoi Jones shows the extent to which the two conjoined direc-

tions approximate language to music (Blues People [New York: William Morrow, 1963], pp. 

30-31 and all of chapter 3). On a more general level, one will recall Pierre Boulez's analysis of a 

double movement in music, dissolution of form, and dynamic overload or proliferation: Con-
versations with Celestin Deliege, 
(London: Eulenberg Books, 1976), pp. 20-22. 

40.  Yann Moulier, preface to Mario Tronti, Ouvriers et Capital (Paris: Bourgois, 1977), 

p. 6. 

41.  Pasolini, L 'experience heretique, p. 62 

42.  See the "Strategy Collective" manifesto on the Quebecois language in Change, no. 30 

(March 1977): it denounces the "myth of subversive language," which implies that simply 

being in a minority is enough to make one a revolutionary ("this mechanist equation derives 

from a populist conception of language  __  Speaking the language of the working class is not 

background image

 

528 □ NOTES TO PP. 106-120

 

what links an individual to the positions of that class.... The argument that Joual has a sub-
versive, countercultural force is entirely idealistic"; p. 188).

 

43.  Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (see the two essential chapters corresponding to the 

two aspects of the order-word, "The Command" and "Transformation"; especially pp. 
313-314, describing the pilgrimage to Mecca and its two coded aspects, mortifying 
petrification and panicked flight). 

44.  [

TRANS

:

 

Translated as "prohibitions of transformation" in the English version of 

Crowds and Power. Enantio- is from the Greek, "to oppose."] 

45.  [

TRANS

:

 

Canetti, Crowds and Power, pp. 378, 380.] 

46.  As we have seen, Hjelmslev imposes a restrictive condition, that of assimilating the 

plane of content to a kind of "signified." Certain authors are therefore correct in objecting 
that the analysis of content he proposes has less to do with linguistics than other disciplines, 
such as zoology (for example, Andre Martinet, with the collaboration of Jeanne Martinet and 
HenrietteWalter,Lalinguistique. Guidealphab'etique[Paris: Danoel, 1969],p. 353).Itseems 
to us, however, that this objection applies only to Hjelmslev's restrictive condition. 

47.  [

TRANS

:

 

See 12, "1227: Treatise on Nomadology," pp. 351-423.] 

48.  See the details of the text of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Lettres du voyageur a son retour, 

trans. Jean-Ciaude Schneider (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969), letter of May 9, 1901. 

5. 587 B.C.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs

 

1.  Claude Levi-Strauss, "Introduction a l'oeuvre de Marcel Mauss," in Marcel Mauss, 

Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1973),pp.48-49 (later in this text Levi-Strauss brings 

out another aspect of the signified). On this first aspect of the atmospheric continuum, see the 

Binswanger's and Arieti's psychiatric descriptions. 

2.  See Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 

209ff. (an analysis of the two cases). 

3.  Levi-Strauss, preface to Don C. Talayesva, Soleil Hopi (Paris: Plon, 1968), p. vi [trans-

lation of Sun Chief, ed. Leo W. Simmons (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942)]. 

4.  For example, in Bantu myth the first founder of the State shows his face and eats and 

drinks in public, whereas the hunter, subsequently the warrior, invents the art of secrecy. See 

Luc de Heusch, Le roi ivre ou I'origine de I'Etat (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 20-25. Heusch 

sees the second moment as proof of a more "refined" civilization; to us, on the other hand, it is 

a different semiotic system, that of war rather than public works. 

5.  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vin-

tage, 1975), p. 29 [translation modified]. 

6.  See A. J. Greimas, "Pratiques et langagesgestuels," in Conditions d'une semiotiquedu 

monde naturel, Langages, no. 10 (June 1968), pp. 3-35. Greimas, however, relates this 

semiotic to categories such as "the subject of the statement" and the "subject of enunciation," 

which seem to us to belong to other regimes of signs. 

7.  On cannibalism as a way of protecting against the souls or names of the dead, and on 

its semiotic function as "calendar," see Pierre Clastres, Chronique des Indiens Guayaki (Paris: 

Plon, 1972), pp. 332-340. 

8.  The foregoing expressions concerning the number are borrowed from Julia Kristeva. 

Kristeva, however, uses them in an analysis of literary texts based on the hypothesis of the 

"signifier": Semiotike. Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 294ff, 317. 

9.  See Paul Serieux and Joseph Capgras, Lesfolies raisonnantes (Paris: Alcan, 1909), and 

Gatian Clerambault, Oeuvre psychiatrique, rpt. (Paris: PUF, 1942). Capgras believes in an 

essentially mixed or polymorphous semiotic; Clerambault abstractly analyzes two pure 

semiotics, although he does recognize that they form de facto mixes. The principal texts on 

background image

 

NOTES TO PP. 120-125 □ 529

 

the origin of the distinction between two groups of delusions are Jean Esquirol, Des maladies 
mentales
(Brussels: J. B. Tircher, 1838) (to what extent is "monomania" distinguishable from 

mania?); and Emil Kraepelin, Psychiatrie. Ein Lehrbuch fur Studierende undArtze, 8th ed. 

(Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1920) [English translation, Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, rpt., ed. 

Thomas Johnstone (New York: Hafner, 1968)] (to what extent is "querulous delusion" distin-

guishable from paranoia?). The question of the second group of delusions, or the passional 

delusions, was broached and analyzed historically by Jacques Lacan, De la psychose 
parano'iaque 
(Paris: Seuil, 1975), and by Daniel Lagache, La jalousie amoureuse (Paris: PUF, 

1947).

 

10.  See Serieux and Capgras, Lesfolies raisonnantes, pp. 340ff, and Clerambault, Oeuwe 

psychiatrique, pp. 369ff: people with passional delusion are overlooked, even in the asylum, 

because they are calm and cunning, "suffering from a limited enough delusion that they know 

how we judge them." This makes it all the more necessary to keep them confined; "such 

patients must not be questioned, but rather maneuvered, and the only way to maneuver them 

is to move them emotionally." 

11.  Esquirol suggests that monomania is a "disease of civilization" and has a social evolu-

tion: it begins religious but tends to become more and more political, tracked by the police 
(Des maladies mentales, vol. 1, p. 400). See also the remarks of Emmanuel Regis, Les regicides 
dans I'histoire et dans le present 
(Lyons: A. Storck, 1890). 

12.  Deuteronomy 1:12. In the "Pleiade" edition of the Bible (Paris: Gallimard, 1959),vol. 

1, p. 510, editor Edouard Dhorme specifies: "Your grievance, literally your proceeding." 

13.  D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (New York: Viking, 1932), pp. 93-94. 
14.  See Edouard Dhorme, La religion des Hebreux nomades (Brussels: Nouvelle 

Societe d'Editions, 1937), and Zecharia Mayani, Les Hyksos et le monde de la Bible (Paris: 

Payot, 1956). The author emphasizes the connections between the Hebrews and the 

Ha-biru (nomadic warriors) and Kenites (nomadic metal workers); what is specific to 

Moses is not the principle of numerical organization, which was borrowed from the 

nomads, but the idea of an always revocable convention-proceeding, contract-proceeding. 

This idea, according to Mayani, derives neither from the rooted farmers nor from the 

nomadic warriors, nor even from the migrants, but from a tribe on the march that thinks of 

itself in terms of subjective destiny. 

15.  See Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 

1968). The painter Titorelli originates the theory of indefinite postponement. Aside from def-

inite acquittal, which does not exist, Titorelli differentiates the two juridical regimes of 

"ostensible acquittal" and "indefinite postponement"; the first is circular and linked to a 

semiotic of the signifier, whereas the second is linear and segmentary, linked to the passional 

semiotic(pp. 152-162). 

16.  [

TRANS

:

 

The King James Bible reads "to flee ... from the presence of the Lord." 

Jonah 1:3.] 

17.  Jerome Lindon was the first to analyze the relation between Jewish prophetism and 

betrayal, in the exemplary case of Jonah. Jonas (Paris: Minuit, 1955). 

18.  Friedrich Holderlin, Remarques sur Oedipe (Paris: Union Generate d'Edition, 1965). 

Holderlin already puts limits on the character of this "slow and difficult" death; see Jean 

Beaufret's fine discussion of the nature of this death and its relation to betrayal: "Man must 

match the categorical turning away of the god, now no more than Time, by himself turning 

away as a traitor." 

19.  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vin-

tage, 1967), sec. 9. 

20.  [

TRANS

:

 

See 10, "1730: Becoming-Intense ...," note 10.] 

21.  [

TRANS

:

 

"Buggers," from the Middle French for "Bulgarians," originally referred to a 

background image

 

530 □ NOTES TO PP. 125-141

 

sect of heretics from Bulgaria suspected of 'unnatural' practices, and later became a general 

term for heretics before taking on its modern meaning.]

 

22.  On the nature of the epic "library" (its imperial character, the role of priests, the circu-

lation between sanctuaries and cities), see Charles Autran, Homere et les origines sacerdotales 
de I'epopee grecque, 
3 vols. (Paris: Denoel, 1938-1944). 

23.  See the techniques for the interpretation of books in the Middle Ages, and the extreme 

attempt by Joachim de Flore, who, on the basis of similarities between the two Testaments, 

induces from within a third state or proceeding. L 'Evangile eternel (Paris: Rieder, 1928). 

24.  For example, Exodus 19:2: "For they were departed from Rephidim, and were come to 

the desert of Sinai, and had pitched in the wilderness, and there Israel camped before the 

mount." 

25.  Henry Miller, Sexus (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 250. 

26.  Louis Althusser, "Ideologic et appareils ideologiques d'Etat," La pens'ee, no. 151 

(May-June 1970), pp. 29-35. 

27.  In Problems of General Linguistics, trans Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: 

University of Florida Press, 1971), pp. 217-222, Emile Benveniste speaks of a proceeding, or 

process (proces). 

28.  One aspect of Strindberg's genius was to elevate the couple, and the domestic squab-

ble, to an intense semiotic level, and to make it a creative factor in the regime of signs. This was 

not the case with Jouhandeau. Klossowski, on the other hand, was able to invent new sources 

and conflicts for the passional cogito for two, from the standpoint of a general theory of signs; 
Les lois de I'hospilalile (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). 

29.  See also Dostoyevsky's The Double. 

30.  On these two forms of redundancy, see the entry on "Redondance" in Andre Martinet, 

La linguistique. Guide alphab'etique (Paris: Danoel, 1969), pp. 331-333. 

31.  Henry Miller, Sexus, p. 229. The theme of the idiot is itself quite diverse. It is an 

explicit part of the cogito according to Descartes, and feeling according to Rousseau. Russian 

literature, however, takes it down other paths, beyond consciousness or passion. 

32.  Gherasim Luca, Le chant de la carpe (Paris: Soleil Noir, 1973), pp. 87-94. 

33.  For example, when the whites introduced money to the Siane of New Guinea, the lat-

ter started off by translating the bills and coins into two categories of nonconvertible goods. 

See Maurice Godelier, "Economie politique et anthropologic economique," L'Homme, vol. 

14, no. 3 (September-December 1964), p. 123. 

34.  On these translations-transformations, see LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York: 

Morrow, 1963), chapters 3-7. 

35.  Miller, Sexus, pp. 479-480. 

36.  Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke, Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey through 

Madness  (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 233. The failure of the 

antipsychi-atry experiment of Kingsley Hall apparently was due as much to these internal 

factors as to external circumstances. 

37.  Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 14. 
38.  "Generative" and "transformational" are Chomsky's terms. For him, the transforma-

tional is precisely the best and most profound way of realizing the generative; we, however, are 

using the terms in a different sense. 

39.  Michel Foucault has developed, in successive levels, a theory of statements addressing 

all of these problems. (1) In The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New 

York: Pantheon, 1982), Foucault distinguishes two kinds of "multiplicities," of content and of 

expression, which are not reducible to relations of correspondence or causality, but are in 

reciprocal presupposition. (2) In Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New 

York: Vintage, 1975), he looks for an agency capable of accounting for the two imbricated, 

background image

 

NOTES TO PP. 141-153 □ 531

 

heterogeneous forms, and finds it in assemblages of power, or micropowers. (3) But these col-
lective assemblages (school, army, factory, hospital, prison, etc.) are only degrees or singulari-
ties in an abstract "diagram," which for its part has only matter and function (the unspecified 
multiplicity of human beings to be controlled). (4) The History of Sexuality. Vol. 
l.Anlntro-duction,  
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), takes yet another 
direction since assemblages are no longer related to and contrasted with a diagram, but rather 
to a "biopoli-tics of population" as an abstract machine. Our only points of disagreement with 
Foucault are the following: (1) to us the assemblages seem fundamentally to be assemblages 
not of power but of desire (desire is always assembled), and power seems to be a stratified 
dimension of the assemblage; (2) the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight that are 
primary, which are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but 
cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization.

 

40.  Louis Hjelmslev proposed a very important conception of "matter" or "purport" 

(sens) as unformed, amorphous, or formless: Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. 
Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), sec. 13, pp. 47-60, and 
Essais linguistiques (Paris: Minuit, 1971), pp. 58ff. (see also the preface by Francois Rastier, 
p. 9). 

41.  The distinction between indexes, icons, and symbols comes from C. S. Peirce, Col-

lected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 
Press, 1931-1958). But his distinctions are based on signifier-signified relations (contiguity 
for the index, similitude for the icon, conventional rule for the symbol); this leads him to make 
the "diagram" a special case of the icon (the icon of relation). Peirce is the true inventor of 
semiotics. That is why we can borrow his terms, even while changing their connotations. First, 
indexes, icons, and symbols seem to us to be distinguished by 
territoriality-deterritorializa-tion relations, not signifier-signified relations. Second, the 
diagram as a result seems to have a distinct role, irreducible to either the icon or the symbol. 
On Peirce's fundamental distinctions and the complex status of the diagram, one may refer 
to Jakobson's analysis, "A la recherche de l'essence du langage," in Problemes du langage, 
ed. Emile Benveniste (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 

6. November 28,1947: How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs

 

1.  [

TRANS

:

 

Antonin Artaud, "To Have Done With the Judgement of God," Selected Writ-

ings, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 571.] 

2.  [

TRANS

:

 

Jules Cotard, Etard sur les maladies cerebrates et mentales (Paris: 

Brail-liere, 1891).] 

3.  [

TRANS

:

 

Dr. Schreber's Memoirs,  quoted by Sigmund Freud, Notes on a Case 

ofPara-noia, vol. 12, Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 

p. 17.] 

4.  William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 131. 

5.  The opposition program-phantasy appears clearly in the work of Michel de M'uzan, 

in relation to a case of masochism. See M'uzan in La sexualit'e perverse, ed. Isle and Robert 

Barande et al. (Paris: Payot, 1972), p. 36. Although he does not specifically discuss this 

opposition, M'uzan uses the notion of the program to question the themes of Oedipus, anxi-

ety, and castration. 

6.  See Kurt Lewin's description of the flow of meat in the American family, "Psychologi-

cal Ecology," Field Theory in Social Science, ed. Dorwin Cartwright (New York: Harper and 

Brothers, 1951), pp. 170-187. 

7.  Albert Dalcq, L'oeufet son dynamisme organisateur (Paris: Albin Michel, 1941), p. 

95: "Forms are contingent upon kinematic dynamism. It is secondary whether or not an ori-

fice forms in the germ. All that counts is the process of immigration itself; what yields an ori- 

background image

 

532 □ NOTES TO PP. 153-170

 

fice fissure or primitive line is not invagination, but pure chronological and quantitative variations."

 

8.  Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p. 8. 
9.  Ibid., pp. xlv-xlvi. 

 

10.  [

TRANS

:

 

Jouissance: "pleasure, enjoyment, orgasm." In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the object 

of desire is irrevocably lost and the subject eternally split. Jouissanceis doubly impossible: life is a 
manque-a-jouir, read as "lack of enjoyment," because the true object of desire is unattainable; and it 
is a manque-a-jouir, read as "a lack to be enjoyed," because jouissance as the orgasmic plenitude of 
union with a substitute object means the annulment of the constitutionally split subject. One of the 
necessary terms, the subject or the object, is always missing.] 

11.  Roger Dupouy, "Du masochisme," Annales m'edico-psychologiques, series 12, vol. 2 

(1929), p. 405. 

12.  Ibid. 
13.  On courtly love, and its radical immanence rejecting both religious transcendence and 

hedonist exteriority, see Rene Nelli, L'erotique des troubadours (Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 
1974), in particular, vol. l,pp. 267, 316, 358, and 370, and vol. 2, pp. 47, 53, and 75. (Also vol. 1, p. 
128: one of the major differences between chivalric love and courtly love is that for "knights the 
valor by which one merits love is always external to love," whereas in the system of courtly love, the 
test is essentially internal to love; war valor is replaced by "sentimental heroism." This is a mutation 
in the war machine.) 

14.  Robert Van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1961); and Jean-Francois 

Lyotard's discussion of it, Economie libidinale (Paris: Minuit, 1974), pp. 241 -251. 

15.  Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 113. 
16.  Artaud,  H'eliogabale,  in  Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 50-51. It is true that 

Artaud still presents the identity of the One and the Multiple as a dialectical unity, one that reduces 
the multiple by gathering it into the One. He makes Heliogabalus a kind of Hegelian. But that is a 
manner of speaking, for from the beginning multiplicity surpasses all opposition and does away with 
dialectical movement. 

17.  [

TRANS

:

 

Artaud, "The Body Is the Body," trans. Roger McKeon, Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, 

vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), p. 59.] 

18.  Artaud,  The Peyote Dance (translation of Les Tarahumaras), trans. Helen Weaver (New 

York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 38-39 [translation modified]. 

19.  [

TRANS

:

 

Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 125.] 

20.  [

TRANS

:

 

Ibid., p. 183.] 

21.  [

TRANS

:

 

Ibid., p. 161.] 

22.  See Cause commune, no. 3 (October 1972). 

7. Year Zero: Faciality

 

1.  Josef von Sternberg, Funin a Chinese Laundry(Nev/ York: MacMillan, 1965), p. 324. 

[

TRANS

:

 

The English version of this phrase reads "merciful darkness."] 

2.  [

TRANS

:

 

"Blumfeld. An Elderly Gentleman." The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka, ed. 

Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983), pp. 183-205.] 

3.  On this ballet, see Jean Barraque's Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1977), which cites the text of the 

argument, pp. 166-171. 

4.  See Otto Isakower, "Contribution a la psychopathologie des phenomenes associes a 

I'endormissement," Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, no. 5 (Spring 1972), pp. 197-210; Bertram D. 
Lewin, "Le sommeil, la bouche et l'ecran du reve," ibid., pp. 211-224; and Rene 

background image

 

NOTES TO PP. 170-183 □ 533

 

Spitz, with the collaboration of W. Godfrey Cobliner, The First Year of Life (New York: Inter-

national Publishers, 1965), pp. 75-82.

 

5.  Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 121-123. 

6.  Klaatsch, "L'evolution du genre humain," in Kreomer, L'Univers et I'humanit'e, vol. 

2: "In vain, we tried to find a trace of red edging around the lips of live, young chimpanzees, 

which resemble man so closely in all other respects.... How would the face of the most gra-

cious young woman look if her mouth was a stripe between two white borders?... In addition, 

the pectoral region of the anthropoid possesses the two nipples of the mammary glands, but 

folds of fat comparable to the breasts never form." And Emile Devaux's formula in Trois 
problemes: I'espece, I'instinct, rhomme(Paris: 
Le Francois, 1933), p. 264: "The child made the 

woman's breast, and the mother the child's lips." 

7.  Face exercises play an essential role in the pedagogical principles of J.-B. de la Salle. 

Even Ignacio de Loyola integrated his teaching landscape exercises or "compositions of 

place" relative to the life of Christ, hell, the world, etc. As Barthes points out, this involves 

skeletal images subordinated to a language, but also active schemas to be completed, colored 

in, like those found in catechisms and devotional handbooks [Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. 

Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976)—Trans.] 

8.  Chretien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail, trans. Robert White Linker (Chapel Hill: 

University of North Carolina Press, 1952), pp. 88-89. A similar scene, dominated by the 

"machinery" of the boat, is found in Malcolm Lowry's novel Ultramarine (Philadelphia: 

Lippincott, 1962), pp. 159-172: a pigeon drowns in waters infested by sharks, "as if a red leaf 

should fall on a white torrent" (p. 170), and this inevitably evokes the image of a bloody face. 

Lowry's scene is imbedded in such different elements and is so particularly organized that 

there can be no question of influence by Chretien de Troyes's scene, only confluence with it. 

This makes it an even better confirmation of the existence of a veritable black hole or red 

mark-white wall abstract machine (snow or water). 

9.  [

TRANS

:

 

Continued in 10, "1730: Becoming-Intense ...," pp. 232-309] 

 

10.  Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form and Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian 

Books, 1957), p. 195-199: "'The kettle began it...' Thus Dickens opens his Cricket on the 
Hearth. ... 
What could be further from films!... But, strange as it may seem, movies also 

were boiling in that kettle.... As soon as we recognize this kettle as a typical close-up, we 

exclaim:'... of course this is the purest Griffith.'... Certainly, this kettle is a typical 

Griffith-esque close-up. A close-up saturated, we now become aware, with typically 

Dickens-esque 'atmosphere,' with which Griffith, with equal mastery, can envelop the severe 

face of life in Way Down East, and the icy cold moral face of his characters, who push the 

guilty Anna onto the shifting surface of a swirling ice-break" (the white wall again). 

11.  Jacques Lizot, Le cercle desfeux (Paris: Seuil, 1976), pp. 34ff. 
12.  On the stranger grasped as Other, see Andre Haudricourt, "Nature et culture dans la 

civilisation de l'igname: l'origine des clones et des clans," L'Homme  vol. 4, no. 1 

(January-April 1964), pp. 98-102. And Robert Jaulin, Gens de soi, gens de I'autre (Paris: 

Union Generate d'Editions, 1973), preface, p. 20. 

13.  Maurice Ronai demonstrates that the landscape, the reality as well as the notion, is 

tied to a very particular semiotic system and very particular apparatuses of power: this is one 

of the sources of geography, as well as a principle behind its political subordination (the land-

scape as "the face of the fatherland or nation"). See "Paysages," in H'erodote,  no. 1 

(January-March 1976), pp. 125-159. 

14.  See Jacques Mercier, Ethiopian Magic Scrolls, trans. Richard Pevear (New York: 

Braziller, 1979). And "Les peintures des rouleaux protecteurs ethiopiens," Journal of Ethio-
pian Studies, 
vol. 14, fasc. 2 (Summer 1974), pp. 89-106 ("The eye stands for the face which 

stands for the body.... The pupils are drawn in the inner spaces.... That is why we must 

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534 □ NOTES TO PP. 183-197

 

speak of directions of magic meaning based on eyes and faces, with the use of traditional 
decorative motifs such as cross-hatching, check patterns, four-pointed stars, etc."). The power 
of Negus, with his ancestry going back to Solomon and his court of magicians, was based on 
his ember-eyes, operating like a black hole, angelic or demonic. Mercier's analyses in their 
entirety constitute an essential contribution to the analysis of facial functions.

 

15.  For Eisenstein's own distinction between his conception of the close-up and 

Griffith's, see Film Form and Film Sense. 

16.  This is a recurring theme in horror novels and science fiction: the eyes are in the black 

hole, not the opposite ("I see a luminous disk emerging from the black hole, resembling eyes"). 
Comic books, Circus No. 2, for example, depict black holes populated by faces and eyes, and 
the traversing of that black hole. On the relation of eyes to holes and walls, see the texts and 
drawing of Jean-Luc Parant, in particular, Lesyeux MMDVI (Paris: Bourgois, 1976). 

17.  See Jean Paris's analyses, L'espace et le regard (Paris: Seuil, 1965), vol. 1, chapter 1 

(also, the evolution of the Virgin and the variation in the relations between her face and that of 
the infant Jesus: vol. 2, chapter 2). 

18.  D. H. Lawrence, "Melville's 'Typee' and 'Omoo,'" Studies in Classic American Litera-

ture (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), p. 197. Lawrence's essay begins with a lovely distinc-
tion between terrestrial and maritime eyes. 

19.  Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, p. 239. 
20.  Ibid., p. 63. 
21.  Ibid., pp. 63-64. 
22.  Wilhelm Reich's Character-Analysis, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Farrar, 

Straus and Giroux, 1970), considers the face and faciality traits to be among the first pieces 
of character "armor" and the first ego resistances (the "occular ring," followed by the "oral 
ring"). The organization of these rings occurs on planes perpendicular to the "orgonotic 
streaming" and oppose the free movement of this streaming throughout the body. Hence the 
importance of eliminating the armor and "dissolving the rings." See pp. 370ff. 

23.  Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 200. 
24.  D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (London: William Heinemann, 1964), p. 339. 

8.1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?"

 

1.  See Jules Amedee Barbey d'Aurevilly, The Diaboliques, trans. Ernest Boyd (New 

York: Knopf, 1925). Of course, the work of Maupassant is not limited to tales; he also wrote 
novellas, or novels containing elements of the novellas. For example, the episode of Lison in 
chapter 4 of Une vie: "It was at the time of Aunt Lison's sudden impulse.... It was never spo-
ken of again, and remained as though enveloped in fog. One evening, Lise, then twenty, threw 
herself into the water without anyone having an inkling why. Nothing in her life or manners, 
could have allowed one to predict this act of madness." 

2.  Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd ed., trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: 

University of Texas Press, 1968). 

3.  Marcel Arland, Le Promeneur (Paris: Pavois, 1944). 
4.  [

TRANS

:

 

"In the Cage," The Novels and Tales of Henry James (Fairfield, N. J.: Augustus 

M. Kelley, 1979), vol. 11, p. 469.] 

5.  Nathalie Sarraute, in "Conversation and Sub-conversation," The Age of Suspicion, 

trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Braziller, 1963), shows how Proust analyzes the smallest move-
ments, glances, or intonations. However, he apprehends them through memory, he assigns 
them a "position," he thinks of them as a sequence of causes and effects; "he rarely... tried to 
relive them and make them relive for the reader in the present, while they were forming and 

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NOTES TO PP. 197-211 □ 535

 

developing, like so many tiny dramas, each one of which has its adventures, its mystery and its 

unforeseeable ending" (p.92).

 

6. [

TRANS

:

 

The French translation consulted by the authors reversed the meaning of this 

passage. The original reads: "She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her earlier sense 

of merely guessing. There were no different shades of distinctions—it all bounded out." In the 
Cage, The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 
vol. 11, p. 472.] 

7. S0ren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: 

Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 46ff. 

8. [

TRANS

:

 

Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-up," in The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected 

Pieces, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956), p.69.] 

9. [

TRANS

:

 

Ibid., pp. 82, 84.] 

 

10. Pierrette Fleutiaux, Histoire du gouffre et de la lunette et autres nouvelles (Paris: 

Jul-liard, 1976), pp. 9-50. 

11. In another novella in the same collection, "Le dernier angle de transparence" (The 

last angle of transparency). Fleutiaux distinguishes three lines of perception, but without 

applying a preestablished schema. The hero has molar perception, which takes in overall 

aggregates and clear-cut elements, well-distributed areas of fullness and emptiness (this per-

ception is coded, inherited, and overcoded by the walls: Don't miss you chair, etc.). But he 

is also caught up in a molecular perception composed of fine and shifting segmentations and 

autonomous traits, where holes appear in what is full and microforms in emptiness, between 

two things, where everything "teems and stirs" with a thousand cracks. The hero's problem 

is that he cannot make up his mind between the two lines and constantly jumps from one to 

the other. Will he be saved by a third line of perception, the perception of escape, a "hypothet-

ical direction barely hinted at" by the angle of the two others, the "angle of transparency" 

opening a new space? 

12. Fernand Deligny, Cahiers de I'immuable, vol. 1, Voix et voir, Recherches, no. 8 

(April 1975). 

13. Henri Laborit wrote a book "in praise of flight," Eloge de lafuite (Paris: Laffont, 

1976). In it, he demonstrates the biological importance of lines of flight among animals, but 

his approach is too formalistic; among human beings, he thinks flight is associated with val-

ues of the imaginary functioning to increase one's "information" about the world. 

14. [

TRANS

:

 

See pp. 188-89.] 

15. Leon Shestov, Chekhov and Other Essays (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 

pp. 8-9 [translation modified to agree with the French edition cited by the authors—Trans]. 

9.1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity

 

1. Jacques Lizot, Le cercle des Feux (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p. 118 
2. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke 

Grundfest Schoeft (New York: Basic Books, 1963): "Do Dual Organizations Exist?" pp. 

132-163. 

3. See two exemplary studies in African Political Systems, ed. Meyer Frotes and E. E. 

Evans-Pritchard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978): Fortes, "The Political System of 

the Tellensi of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast," pp. 239-271, and 

Evans-Pritchard, "The Nuer of the Southern Sudan," pp. 272-296. 

4. Georges Balandier analyzes the ways in which ethnologists and sociologists define 

this opposition: Political Anthropology, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 

1970), pp. 137-143. 

5. On the initiation of a shaman and the role of the tree among the Yanomami Indians, see 

Jacques Lizot, Le cercle des feux, pp. 127-135: "Between his legs a hole is hastily dug in 

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536 □ NOTES TO PP. 211-217

 

which they place the base of the pole they erect there. Turaewe draws imaginary lines on the 

ground radiating in all directions. He says, 'These are the roots.' "

 

6.  The State, therefore, is not defined solely by the type of public powers it has, but also 

as a resonance chamber for private as well as public powers. It is for this reason that Althusser 

says: "The distinction between public and private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, 

and valid in the subordinate domains where bourgeois law exercises its powers. The domain 

of the State eludes it because it is beyond Law.... It is on the contrary the foundation for any 

distinction between the public and the private." "Ideologie et appareils ideologiques d'Etat," 
LaPensee, no. 151 (June 1970), pp. 29-35. 

7.  Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe etpens'ee chez les Grecs (Paris: Maspero, 1971-1974), vol. 

1, part 3 ("When it becomes communal, when it is erected in the public and open space of the 

agora and no longer inside private residences.. . the hearth [foyer: also, focus, focal point— 

Trans.] expresses the center as common denominator of all of the houses constituting the 
polis"; p. 210). 

8.  Paul Virilio, L'insecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975), pp. 120, 174-175. On 

"castrametation": "Geometry is the necessary foundation for a calculated expansion of 

State power in space and time; conversely, this supplies the State with an ideal, sufficient fig-

ure, provided that the figure is ideally geometrical. . .. But Fenelon, voicing his opposition 

to the State policies of Louis XIV, exclaimed: 'Beware the bewitchments and diabolical 

attributes of geometry!"' 

9.  Meyer Fortes analyzes the difference among the Tellensi between "guardians of the 

earth" and chiefs. This distinction between powers is fairly widespread among primitive soci-

eties; but the important thing is that it is organized in such a way as to prevent the powers from 

resonating. For example, according to Louis Berthe's analysis of the Baduj of Java, the power 

of the guardian of the earth, on the one hand, is considered to be passive and feminine but, on 

the other hand, is assigned to the eldest son: this is not an "intrusion of kinship into the politi-

cal order" but on the contrary "a requirement of a political order translated in kinship terms" 

in order to prevent the establishment of a resonance leading to private property. See Berthe, 

"Aines et cadets, l'alliance et la hierarchie chez les Baduj," L'Homme,  vol. 5, nos. 3/4 

(July-December 65), pp. 189-223. 

 

10.  Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 1976), 

especially chapter 15 (Barnabas's statements [the phrase quoted is on p. 228—Trans]). The 

parable of the two offices—molar and molecular—does not just have a physical interpreta-

tion, as in Eddington, but a properly bureaucratic one as well. 

11.  The strength of Jean-Pierre Faye's book, Langages totalitaires (Paris: Hermann, 

1972), is that it illustrates the multiplicity of these focuses, both practical and semiotic, on the 

basis of which Nazism was constituted. That is why Faye is the first both to do a rigorous anal-

ysis of the concept of the totalitarian State (in its Italian and German origins) and to refuse to 

define Italian fascism and German Nazism by that concept (which operates on a different 

plane than the "subjacent process"). Faye goes into all of these points in La critique du langage 
et son economie 
(Paris: Galilee, 1973). 

12.  On the complementarity between the "macropolitics of security" and the 

"micropoli-tics," see Virilio, L'insecurite du territoire, pp. 96, 130, 228-235. The 

microorganization of permanent stress in large modern cities has frequently been noted. 

13.  Valery Giscard d'Estaing, speech of June 1, 1976, before the Institut des Hautes 

Etudes de Defense Nationale (complete text in Le Monde, June 4, 1976). 

14.  On the "flow with mutant power" and the distinction between the two kinds of money, 

see Bernard Schmitt, Monnaie, salaires et profits (Paris: Castella, 1980), pp. 236, 275-277. 

15.  Michel Lelart, Le dollar. Monnaie Internationale (Paris: Albatros, 1975), p. 57. 

16.  Take Foucault's analysis, in Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New 

background image

 

NOTES TO PP. 217-224 □ 537

 

York: Vintage, 1975), of what he calls the "microphysics of power." First, it is indeed a ques-

tion of miniaturized mechanisms, or molecular focuses operating in detail or in the infinitely 

small and forming any number of "disciplines" in the school, army, factory, prison, etc. (see 

pp. 138ff.). But second, these segments themselves, and the focuses operating within them at 

the molecular level, present themselves as the singularities of an "abstract" diagram coexten-

sive with the entire social field, or as quanta deducted from a flow of a nonspecific nature— 

the nonspecific flow being defined by "a multiplicity of individuals" to be controlled (see pp. 

205ff. [translation modified]).

 

17.  On "quantitative sinfulness," quanta, and the qualitative leap, one may refer to the 

microtheology constructed by Sdren Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter 

Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957). 

18.  According to Tarde, psychology is quantitative, but only insofar as it studies the desire 

and belief components of sensation. And logic is quantitative when it does not restrict itself to 

forms of representation, but extends to degrees of belief and desire, and their combinations; 

see La logique sociale (Paris: Alcan, 1893). 

19.  On all of these points, see especially Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of 

Capitalism,  rev. ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1964), and Georges Duby, The 
Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to Twelfth 
Century, 
trans. Howard E. Clarke (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974). 

20.  Rosa Luxemburg, in "Social Reform or Revolution," and "Mass Strike, Party and 

Trade Unions," in Selected Political Writings, ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review, 

1971), formulated the problem of the differences and relations between masses and classes, 

but from a still-subjective point of view: masses as the "instinctual basis of class conscious-

ness" (see Nicolas Boulte and Jacques Moiroux, "Masse et Parti," Partisans, no. 45, Rose 
Luxemburg vivante 
[December-January 1969], pp. 29-38. Alain Badiou and Francois Balmes 

advance a more objective hypothesis: masses are "invariants" that oppose the State-form in 

general and exploitation, whereas classes are the historical variables that determine the con-

crete State, and, in the case of the proletariat, the possibility of its effective dissolution; De 
I'ideologie 
[Paris: Maspero, 1976]). But it is difficult to see, first of all, why masses are not 

themselves historical variables, and second, why the word is applied only to the exploited (the 

"peasant-plebeian" mass), when it is also suitable for seigneurial, bourgeois masses—or even 

monetary masses. 

21.  Jules Michelet, Histoire de France au seizieme siecle in Oeuvres Completes, vol. 7, ed. 

Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1971-). 

22.  Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, trans. Bernard Miall (New York: 

Norton, 1939), p. 22. 

23.  See Emile Felix Gautier, Genseric, roi des Vandales (Paris: Payot, 1932). ("Precisely 

because they were the weakest, eternally being pushed from behind, they were forced to go 

the farthest.") 

24.  Totalitarianism is not defined by the size of the public sector because in many cases 

there is still a liberal economy. What defines it is the artificial constitution of "closed vessels," 

particularly monetary and industrial. It is primarily in this sense that Italian fascism and Ger-

man Nazism were totalitarian States, as demonstrated by Daniel Guerin in Fascism and Big 
Business, 
trans. Frances and Mason Merrill (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1939), chapter 9. 

25.  Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 27: "These relations go right down into the depths 

of society, they are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the 

frontier between classes and they do not merely reproduce... the general form of the law or 

government... .They define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each 

of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggle, and of an at least temporary inversion of the 

power relation." 

background image

 

538 □ NOTES TO PP. 225-237

 

26.  [

TRANS

:

 

Kafka, T/ae Catffe, pp. 233, 238.] 

27.  On these aspects of banking power, see Suzanne de Brunhoff, L 'offre de monnaie. Cri-

tique d'un concept (Paris: Maspero, 1971), especially pp. 102-131. 

28.  Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley: University of California 

Press, 1971), pp. 57-60. 

29.  Maurice Blanchot, L'amiti'e(Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 232. 
30.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-up," in The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected Pieces, 

ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956), pp. 77-78, 81. 

31.  [

TRANS

:

 

See 12, "1227: Treatise on Nomadology," Proposition IX, pp. 416-423.] 

32.  Klaus Mann, Mephisto, trans. Robin Smith (New York: Random House, 1977), pp. 

202-204. This kind of declaration abounds, at the very moment when the Nazis were succeed-
ing. See Goebbels's famous formulations: "In the world of absolute fatality in which Hitler 
moves, nothing has meaning any longer, neither good nor bad, time nor space, and what other 
people call success cannot be used as a criterion.... 
Hitler will probably end in catastrophe"; 
Hitler parle a ses generaux (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964). This catastrophism can be reconciled 
with considerable satisfaction, good conscience and comfortable tranquillity. There is a 
whole bureaucracy of catastrophe. On Italian fascism, one may consult, in particular, the 
analysis of Maria-Antonietta Macciochi, "Sexualite feminine dans I'ideologie fasciste," Tel 
Quel, 
no. 66 (Summer 1976), pp. 26-42: the women's death squad, the public display of wid-
ows and mothers in mourning, the slogan (mots d'ordre) "Coffins and Cradles." 

3 3. Paul Virilio, L 'insecurity du territoire, chapter 1. Although Hannah Arendt identifies 

Nazism and totalitarianism, she expressed this principle of Nazi domination: "Their idea of 
domination was something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can ever achieve, 
but only a movement that is constantly kept in motion"; The Origins of Totalitarianism (New 
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 326; even the war, and the danger of losing the 
war, acted as accelerators (pp. 325-326, 394ff, 41 Off., 462ff).

 

10.1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, 

Becoming-Imperceptible

 

1.  On the complementarity between series and structure, and how it differs from evolu-

tionism, see Henri Daudin, Cuvier et Lamarck. Les classes zoologiques et Tid'ee de serie 
animale, 
vol. 2 of Etudes d'histoire des sciences naturelles (Paris: Alcan, 1926); and Michel 

Foucault, The Order of 'Things (NewYork: Vintage, 1970). 

2.  See Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: 

Harper, 1962), and Gaston Bachelard, Lautr'eamont (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1939). 

3.  Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 

1963), p. 78. 

4.  Jean-Pierre Vernant in Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne (Civilisations et 

societes, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 15-16. 

5.  On the opposition between sacrificial series and totemic structure, see Levi-Strauss, 

The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 223-228. Despite all of his 

severity toward the series, Levi-Strauss recognizes the compromise between the two themes: 

structure itself implies a very concrete feeling for affinities (pp. 37-38) and is based on two 

series between which it organizes homologies of relations. In particular, 

"becoming-historical" can bring complications or degradations that replace these 

homologies with resemblances and identifications between terms (see pp. 115ff., and what 

Levi-Strauss calls the "flipside of totemism"). 

6.  Jean Duvignaud, L'anomie. Heresie et Subversion (Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1973). 

background image

 

NOTES TO PP. 240-247 □ 539

 

7.  [

TRANS

:

 

H. P. Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," in The Dream-Quest 

of Unknown Kadath (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), pp. 191-192.] 

8.  Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Lettres du voyageur a son retour, trans. Jean-Claude 

Schneider (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969), letter of May 9, 1901. 

9.  A nton Reiser (extracts) in La legende dispers'ee. A nthologie du romantisme allemand 

(Paris: Union Generate d'Editions, 1976), pp. 36-43. 

 

10.  [

TRANS

:

 

A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New 

York: Dutton, 1972); Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, Manual de zoolog'ia 
fantastica 
(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1957), p. 9. The lobizbn is a fantastic 

creature of Uruguayan folklore to which many shapes are attributed.] 

11.  On the man of war, his extrinsic position in relation to the State, the family, and reli-

gion, and on the becomings-animal, becomings-wild animal he enters into, see Dumezil, in 

particular, Mythes et dieux des Germains (Paris: E. Leroux, 1939); Horace et les Curiaces 

(Paris: Gallimard, 1942); The Destiny of the Warrior, trans. Alf Hiltebeital (Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 1970); Mythe et epopee (Paris: Gallimard, 1968-1973), vol. 2. One may 

also refer to the studies on leopard-man societies, etc., in Black Africa; it is probable that these 

societies derive from brotherhoods of warriors. But after the colonial State prohibited tribal 

wars, they turned into crime associations, while still retaining their territorial and political 

importance. One of the best studies on this subject is Paul Ernest Joset, Les societes secretes 
des hommes-Teopards en Afrique noire 
(Paris: Payot, 1955). The becomings-animal proper to 

these groups seem to us to be very different from the symbolic relations between human and 

animal as they appear in State apparatuses, but also in pre-State institutions of the totemism 

type. Levi-Strauss clearly demonstrates that totemism already implies a kind of embryonic 

State, to the extent that it exceeds tribal boundaries (The Savage Mind, pp. 157ff.). 

12.  [

TRANS

:

 

Kafka, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," in The Complete Stories of 

Franz Kafka, ed. Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983).] 

13.  Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. 

Fawcett, intro. Michel Foucault (Boston: Reidel, 1978), pp. 73-74. 

14.  D. H. Lawrence: "I am tired of being told there is no such animal.... If I am a giraffe, 

and the ordinary Englishmen who write about me and say they know me are nice well-behaved 

dogs, there it is, the animals are different.... You don't love me. The animal that I am you 

instinctively dislike"; The Collected Letters ofD. H. Lawrence, vol. 2, ed. Harry T. Moore 

(New York: Viking, 1962), letter to J. M. Murry, May 20, 1929, p. 1154. 

15.  [

TRANS

:

 

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 36, "The Quarter-Deck."] 

16.  Rene Thorn, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, trans. D. H. Fowler (Reading, 

Mass.: Benjamin Fowler/Cummings, 1975), p. 319. 

17.  Edward Leach, Rethinking Anthropology (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), 

pp. 18-25. 

18.  [

TRANS

:

 

Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, Hugues-le-loup  (Paris: J. 

Bonaventure, n.d.).] 

19.  [

TRANS

:

 

Leach, Rethinking Anthropology, p. 18.] 

20.  See Jacques Lacarriere, Les hommes ivres de dieu (Paris: Fayard, 1975). 

21.  Pierre Gordon, in Sex and Religion, trans. Renee and Hilda Spodheim (New York: 

Social Science Publishers, 1949), studied the role of animal-men in rites of "sacred 

defloration." These animal-men impose a ritual alliance upon filiative groups, themselves 

belong to brotherhoods that are on the outside or on the fringes, and are masters of contagion 

and epidemic. Gordon analyzes the reaction of the villages and cities when they begin to fight 

the animal-men in order to win the right to perform their own initiations and order their alli-

ances according to their respective filiations (for example, the fight against the dragon). We 

find the same theme, for example, in Genevieve Calame-Griaule and Z. Ligers, "L'homme- 

background image

 

540 □ NOTES TO PP. 247-261

 

hyene dans la tradition soudanaise," L'Homme, 1, 2 (May-August 1961), pp. 89-118: the 

hyena-man lives on the fringes of the village, or between two villages, and can keep a lookout 

in both directions. A hero, or even two heroes with a fiancee in each other's village, triumphs 

over the man-animal. It is as though it were necessary to distinguish two very different states 

of alliance: a demonic alliance that imposes itself from without, and imposes its law upon all 

of the filiations (a forced alliance with the monster, with the man-animal), and a consensual 

alliance, which is on the contrary in conformity with the law of filiations and is established 

after the men of the villages have defeated the monster and have organized their own rela-

tions. This sheds new light on the question of incest. For it is not enough to say that the prohi-

bition against incest results from the positive requirements of alliance in general. There is 

instead a kind of alliance that is so foreign and hostile to filiation that it necessarily takes the 

position of incest (the man-animal always has a relation to incest). The second kind of alliance 

prohibits incest because it can subordinate itself to the rights of filiation only by lodging itself, 

precisely, between two distinct filiations. Incest appears twice, once as a monstrous power of 

alliance when alliance overturns filiation, and again as a prohibited power of filiation when 

filiation subordinates alliance and must distribute it among distinct lineages.

 

22.  [

TRANS

:

 

See Fitzgerald, "The Crack-up," in The Crack-up. With Other Uncollected 

Pieces, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1956). The allusion to Faust is to 

Goethe, Faust, Part I, lines 1323-1324.] 

23.  Richard Matheson and Isaac Asimov are of particular importance in this evolution 

(Asimov extensively develops the theme of symbiosis). 

24.  Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 159. 

25.  [

TRANS

:

 

Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," p. 197.] 

26.  See D. H. Lawrence, the first and second poems of Tortoises  (New York: T. 

Selzer, 1921). 

27.  [

TRANS

:

 

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1931), 

p. 139.] 

28.  See the Inquisition manual, Le marteau des sorciers (1486), ed. H. Institoris and J. 

Sprengler (Paris: Plon, 1973), vol. l,p. 10,andvol. 2, p. 8. The first and simplest case is that of 

Ulysses' companions, who believed themselves, and were believed to have been, transformed 

into pigs (or again, King Nebuchadnezzar, transformed into an ox). The second case is more 

complicated: Diomedes' companions do not believe they have been changed into birds, since 

they are dead, but demons take over birds' bodies and pass them off as those of Diomedes' 

companions. The need to distinguish this more complex case is explained by phenomena of 

transfer of affects; for example, a lord on a hunting excursion cuts off the paw of a wolf and 

returns home to find his wife, who had not left the house, with a hand cut off; or a man strikes 

cats, and the exact wounds he inflicts turn up on women. 

29.  On the problem of intensities in the Middle Ages, the proliferation of theses on this 

topic, the constitution of kinetics and dynamics, and the particularly important role of 

Nicholas Oresme, see Pierre Duhem's classic work, Le systeme du monde (Paris: A. Hermann 

& Fils, 1913-1959), vols. 7-9 (La physiqueparisienne au XlVesiecle). 

30.  Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Principes dephilosophie zoologique(Paris: Picton et 

Didier, 1930). And on particles and their movements, Notions synth'etiques, historiques et 
physiologiques de philosophie naturelle 
(Paris: Denain, 1838). 

31.  Vladimir Slepian, "Fils de chien," Minuit, no. 7 (January 1974). We have given a 

very simplified presentation of this text. 

32.  See Roger Dupouy, "Du masochisme," Annales M'edico-psychologiques, series 12, 

vol. 2 (1929), p. 405. 

33.  This is sometimes written "eccei ty," deriving the word from ecce, "here is." This is an 

error, since Duns Scotus created the word and the concept from haec, "this thing." But it is a 

background image

 

NOTES TO PP. 261-265 □ 541

 

fruitful error because it suggests a mode of individuation that is distinct from that of a thing or 

a subject.

 

34.  Michel Tournier, Les meteores (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), chapter 23, "L'ame deployee." 

35.  [

TRANS

:

 

On Aeon versus chronos, see Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 

especially series 23, pp. 190-197.] 

36.  Pierre Boulez, Conversations with Celestin Deliege (London: Eulenberg Books, 

1976), pp. 68-71 ("It is not possible to introduce phenomena of tempo into music that has 

been calculated only electronically, in ... lengths expressed in seconds or microseconds"; p. 

70). 

37.  Ray Bradbury, The Machineries of Joy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), p. 53. 

38.  [

TRANS

:

 

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 

1925), p. 11.] 

39.  Gustave Guillaume has proposed a very interesting conception of the verb. He dis-

tinguishes between an interior time, enveloped in the "process," and an exterior time per-

taining to the distinction between epochs (Epoques et niveaux temporels dans lesysteme de 
la conjugaisonfrancaise, Cahiers de linguistique structurale 
[Universite de Laval, Quebec], 

no. 4 [1955]). It seems to us that these two poles correspond respectively to the 

infinitive-becoming, Aeon, and the present-being, Chronos. Each verb leans more or less in 

the direction of one pole or the other, not only according to its nature, but also according 

to the nuances of its modes and tenses, with the exception of "becoming" and "being," 

which correspond to both poles. Proust, in his study of Flaubert's style, shows how the 

imperfect tense in Flaubert takes on the value of an infinitive-becoming: Chroniques 

(Paris: Gallimard, 1927), pp. 197-199.] 

40.  On the problem of proper names (in what sense is the proper name outside the limits 

of classification and of another nature, and in what sense is it at the limit and still a part of 

classification?), see Alan Henderson Gardiner, The Theory of Proper Names, 2nd ed. (New 

York: Oxford University Press, 1957), and Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, chapter 7 ("Time 

Regained"), pp. 217-244. 

41.  We have already encountered this problem of the indifference of psychoanalysis to 

the use of the indefinite article or pronoun among children: as early as Freud, but more espe-

cially in Melanie Klein (the children she analyzes, in particular, Little Richard, speak in terms 

of "a," "one," "people," but Klein exerts incredible pressure to turn them into personal and 

possessive family locutions). It seems to us that Laplanche and Pontalis are the only ones in 

psychoanalysis to have had any inkling that indefinites play a specific role; they protested 

against any overrapid interpretive reduction: "Fantasme originaire," Les temps modernes, 

no. 215 (April 1964), pp. 1861, 1868. 

42.  See the subjectivist or personalist conception of language in Emile Benveniste, Prob-

lems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of 

Miami Press, 1971), chapters 20 ("Subjectivity in Language," pp. 223-230) and 21 ("Analyti-

cal Philosophy and Language," pp. 231-238), especially pp. 220-221 and 225-226. 

43.  The essential texts of Maurice Blanchot serve to refute the theory of the "shifter" and 

of personology in linguistics. See L'entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 556-567. 

And on the difference between the two propositions, "I am unfortunate" and "he is unfortu-

nate," or between "I die" and "one dies," see La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 

29-30, and The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 

1982), pp. 90, 122, 126. Blanchot demonstrates that in all of these cases the indefinite has 

nothing to do with "the banality of daily life," which on the contrary would be on the side of 

the personal pronoun. 

44.  [

TRANS

:

 

These quotes, the first from Nietzsche, the second from Kafka, are quoted 

more fully in 12, "1227: Treatise on Nomadology," p. 353.] 

background image

 

542 □ NOTES TO PP. 265-274

 

45.  For example, Francois Cheng, Chinese Poetic Writing, trans. Donald A. Riggs and 

Jerome P. Seaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), his analysis of what he calls 

"the passive procedures," pp. 23-42. 

46.  See the statements of the "repetitive" American musicians, particularly Steve Reich 

and Philip Glass. 

47.  Nathalie Sarraute, in The Age of Suspicion, trans. Marie Jolas (New York: Braziller, 

1963), shows how Proust, for example, is torn between the two planes, in that he extracts from 

his characters "the infinitesimal particles of an impalpable matter," but also glues all of the 

particles back into a coherent form, slips them into the envelope of this or that character. See 

pp. 50, 94-95. 

48.  See the distinction between the two Planes in Artaud. One of them is denounced as 

the source of all illusions: The Peyote Dance (translation of Las Tarahumaras), trans. Helen 

Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 12-13. 

49.  Robert Rovini, introduction to Friedrich Holderlin, Hyperion (Paris: 10/18,1968). 

50.  We have referred to an unpublished study of Kleist by Mathieu Carriere. 

51.  "Where did the title of your second book, A Year From Monday, come from?" "From 

a plan a group of friends and I made to meet each other again in Mexico 'a year from next 

Monday.' We were together on a Saturday. And we were never able to fulfil that plan. It's a 

form of silence.... The very fact that our plan failed, the fact we were unable to meet does not 

mean that everything failed. The plan wasn't a failure"; John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the 
Birds 
(Boston: Marion Boyers, 1981), pp. 116-117. 

52.  That is why we were able to take Goethe as an example of a transcendental plane. 

Goethe, however, passes for a Spinozist; his botanical and zoological studies uncover an 

immanent plane of composition, which allies him to Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire (this resem-

blance has often been pointed out). Nonetheless, Goethe retains the twofold idea of a devel-

opment of form and a formation-education of the Subject; for this reason, his plane of 

immanence has already crossed over to the other side, to the other pole. 

53.  On all of these points (proliferations-dissolutions, accumulations, indications of 

speed, the affective and dynamic role), see Pierre Boulez, Conversations with Celestin 
Deliege, 
pp. 21-22, 68-71. In another text, Boulez stresses a little-known aspect of Wagner: 

not only are the leitmotifs freed from their subordination to the scenic characters, but the 

speeds of development are freed from the hold of a "formal code" or a tempo ("Le temps 

re-cherche," in Das Rheingold Programmheft, vol. I [Bayreuth, 1976], pp. 3-11). Boulez 

pays homage to Proust for being one of the first to understand this floating and 

transformable role of Wagnerian motifs. 

54.  The themes of speed and slowness are most extensively developed in The Captive: 

"To understand the emotions which they arouse, and which others even better-looking do not, 

we must realise that they are not immobile, but in motion, and add to their person a sign corre-

sponding to that which in physics denotes speed... to such beings, such fugitive beings, their 

own nature and our anxiety fasten wings"; vol. 3 oi Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. 

Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 

86-87, 88. 

55.  [

TRANS

:

 

The word translated as "proximity" is voisinage, which Deleuze and Guattari 

draw from set theory. The corresponding mathematical term in English is "neighborhood."] 

56.  Louis Wolfson, Leschizo et les langues, preface by Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Gallimard, 

1970). 

57.  Rene Scherer and Guy Hocquenghem, Co-ire, Recherche, no. 22 (1976), pp. 76-82: 

see their critique of Bettelheim's thesis, which considers the becomings-animal of the child 

merely an autistic symbolism that expresses the anxiety of the parents more than any reality 

of the child. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress (New York: Free Press, 1967). 

background image

 

NOTES TO PP. 274-287 □ 543

 

58.  Philippe Gavi, "Les philosophes du fantastique," Liberation, March 31, 1977. For 

the preceding cases, what we must arrive at is an understanding of certain so-called neurotic 

behaviors as a function of becomings-animal, instead of relegating becomings-animal to a 

psychoanalytic interpretation of behaviors. We saw this in relation to masochism (and Lolito 

explains that the origin of his feats lies in certain masochistic experiences; a fine text by Chris-

tian Maurel conjugates a becoming-monkey and a becoming-horse in a masochistic pairing). 

Anorexia would also have to be understood from the point of view of becoming-animal. 

59.  See Newsweek, May 16, 1977, p. 57. 
60.  See Trost, Visible et invisible (Paris: Arcanes) and Librement m'ecanique (Paris: 

Minotaure): "She was simultaneously, in her sensible reality and in the ideal prolongation of 

her lines, like the projection of a human group yet to come." 

61.  See the examples of structural explanation proposed by Jean-Pierre Vernant, in 

Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne, pp. 15-16. 

62.  On transvestism in primitive societies, see Bruno Bettelheim (who offers an 

identificatory psychological interpretation), Symbolic Wounds (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 

1954), and especially Gregory Bateson (who proposes an original structural interpretation), 
Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New 
Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of Views, 
2nd ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer-

sity Press, 1958). 

63.  Francois Cheng, Chinese Poetic Writing, p. 13. 

64.  The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), 

vol. 3, p. 209: "The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every 

atom." On all of these points, we make use of an unpublished study on Virginia Woolf by 

Fanny Zavin. 

65.  [

TRANS

:

 

Sdren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, 

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 104.] 

66.  Ibid., .p. 49. Fear and Trembling seems to us to be Kierkegaard's greatest book 

because of the way it formulates the problem of movement and speed, not only in its content, 

but also in its'style and composition. 

67.  [

TRANS

:

 

Fear and Trembling, p. 61.] 

68.  Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 297ff. 
69.  Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day, 

1968). Fiedler explains the secret alliance of the white American with the black or the Indian 

by a desire to escape the molar form and ascendancy of the American woman. 

70.  Henri Michaux, Miserable Miracle: Mescaline, trans. Louise Varese (San Francisco: 

City Lights, 1963), p. 87: "The horror of it was that I was nothing but a line. In normal life one 

is a sphere, a sphere that surveys panoramas.... Now only a line... the accelerated line I had 

become." See Michaux's line drawings. In the first eighty pages of The Major Ordeals of the 
Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones, 
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harcourt Brace 

Jovanovich, 1974), Michaux further develops the analysis of speeds, molecular perceptions, 

and "microphenomena" or "microoperations." 

71.  [

TRANS

:

 

A rewriting of Freud's famous phrase, "Where id was, there ego shall be" 

(New Introductory Lectures, Standard Edition, vol. 22, p. 80), and Lacan's earlier rewriting of 

it in "The Freudian Thing," Ecrits,  trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 

128-129,136.] 

72.  Artaud, The Peyote Dance, pp. 12-14. 

73.  Michaux, Miserable Miracle ("Remaining Master of One's Speeds," pp. 87-88). 

74.  On the possibilities of silicon, and its relation to carbon from the point of view of 

organic chemistry, see the article, "Silicium," in the Encyclopedia Universalis. 

75.  Luc de Heusch shows that it is the man of war who brings the secret: he thinks, eats, 

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544 □ NOTES TO PP. 287-293

 

loves, judges, arrives in secret, while the man of the State proceeds publicly. See Le roi ivre ou 
I'origine de VEtat 
(Paris: Gallimard, 1972). The idea of the State secret is a late one and 
assumes that the war machine has been appropriated by the State apparatus.

 

76.  In particular, Georg Simmel. See The Sociology ofGeorg Simmel, trans. Kurt H. 

Wolff (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1950), chapter 3. 

77.  Paul Ernest Joset clearly notes these two aspects of the secret initiatory society, the 

Mambela of the Congo: on the one hand, its relation of influence over the traditional political 
leaders, which gets to the point of a transfer of social powers; and on the other hand, its de 
facto relation with the Anioto, as a secret hindsociety of crime or leopard-men (even if the 
Anioto are of another origin than the Mambela). See Les societes secretes des 
hommes-leopards en Afrique noire, 
chapter 5. 

78.  On the psychoanalytic conceptions of the secret, see Du secret, Nouvelle revue de 

psychanalyse, no. 14 (Fall 1976); and for the evolution of Freud on this subject, the article by 
Claude Girard, "Le secret aux origines," pp. 55-83. 

79.  Bernard Pingaud shows, on the basis of the exemplary text of Henry James, "The 

Figure in the Carpet" [The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 
1907-1917), vol. 15—Trans.], how the secret jumps from content to form, and escapes both: 
Du secret, pp. 247-249. This text has been frequently commented upon from the viewpoint of 
psychoanalysis; above all, J.-B. Pontalis, Apres Freud (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). But psycho-
analysis remains prisoner to a necessarily disguised content and a necessarily symbolic form 
(structure, absent cause ...), at a level that defines both the unconscious and language. That is 
why, in its aesthetic or literary applications, it misses the secret in an author, as well as the 
secret ojan author. The same goes for the secret of Oedipus: they concern themselves with the 
first two kinds of secret but not with the second, which is nevertheless the most important. 

80.  On the fogginess of the idea of majority, see Kenneth Arrow's two famous themes, 

"the Condorcet effect" and the "theorem of collective decision." 

81.  See William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (New York: Vintage, 1948), p. 216. Speak-

ing of Southern whites after the Civil War (not only the poor but also the old monied families), 
Faulkner writes, "We are in the position of the German after 1933 who had no other alterna-
tive but to be a Nazi or a Jew." 

82.  The subordination of the line to the point is clearly evident in the arborescent 

schemas: see Julien Pacotte, Le reseau arborescent, scheme primordial de la pensee (Paris: 
Hermann, 1936), and the status of centered or hierarchical systems according to Pierre 
Rosenthiehl and Jean Petitot, "Automate asocial et systemes acentres," Communications, no. 
22 (1974), pp. 45-62. The arborescent schema of majority could be presented as follows: 

 

83. A line of becoming, in relation to the localizable connection of A and B (distance), or 

in relation to their contiguity:

 

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NOTES TO PP. 293-298 D 545

 

A «... -_« B

 

 

A

4»B

 

84.  The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, p. 236 (Wednesday, November 28, 1928). The 

same thing applies to the works of Kafka, in which childhood blocks function as the opposite 
of childhood memories. Proust's case is more complicated because he performs a mixture of 
the two. The situation of the psychoanalyst is to grasp memories or phantasies, but never 
childhood blocks. 

85.  For example, in the system of memory, the formation of a memory implies a diago-

nal that turns present A into representation A' in relation to the new present B, and into A" in 
relation to C, etc.: 

order of time

 

See Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin 

Heidegger, trans. James S. Churchill, intro. Calvin O. Schrag (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-

sity Press, 1964), pp. 48-50.

 

86.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: 

Cambridge University Press, 1983), "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," 

sec. 1, pp. 63-64. 

87.  On all of these themes, see Pierre Boulez. (1) On how transversals always tend to 

escape horizontal and vertical coordinates of music, sometimes even drawing "virtual lines," 

see Notes of an Apprenticeship, ed. Paule Thevenin, trans. Robert Weinstock (New York: 

Knopf, 1968), pp. 231 -232,295-301,382-383. (2) On the idea of the sound block or "block of 

duration," in relation to this transversal, see Boulez on Music Today, trans. Susan Bradshaw 

and Richard Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 55-59. (3) On 

the distinction between points and blocks, "punctual sets," and "aggregative sets" with vary-

ing individuality, see "Sonate que me veux-tu?", Mediations, no. 7 (1964). The hatred of 

memory appears frequently in Boulez; see "Eloge de l'amnesie," Musique enjeu, no. 4 (1971), 

pp. 5-14, and "J'ai horreur du souvenir," in Roger Desormiere et son temps, ed. Denise Mayer 

and Pierre Souvtchinsky (Monaco: Ed. du Rocher, 1966). Confining ourselves to contempo-

rary examples, one finds analogous declarations in Stravinsky, Cage, Berio. Of course, there is 

a musical memory that is tied to coordinates and is exercised in social settings (getting up, 

going to bed, beating a retreat). But the perception of a musical "phrase" appeals less to mem-

ory, even of the reminiscence type, than to an extension or contraction of perception of the 

encounter type. It should be studied how each musician sets in motion veritable blocks of for-
getting: 
for example, what Jean Barraque calls "slices of forgetting" and "absent develop-

ments" in the work of Debussy; Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 169-171. One can refer to a 

general study by Daniel Charles, "La musique etl'oubli," Traverses, no. 4 (1977), pp. 14-23. 

88.  Roland Barthes, "Rasch," in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard 

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), pp. 300-302, 308-309. 

89.  There are many differences among painters, in all respects, but also a common 

r

^               

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546 □ 

NOTES TO PP. 298-305

 

movement: see Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane in vol. 2 of Complete Writings on 
Art, 
ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), pp. 524-700; and Paul 
Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay, intro. Herbert Reed (London: Faber, 1966). The 
aim of statements like those of Mondrian on the exclusive value of the vertical and the hori-
zontal is to show the conditions under which the vertical and horizontal are sufficient to cre-
ate a transversal, which does not even have to be drawn; for example, coordinates of unequal 
thickness intersect inside the frame and extend outside the frame, opening a "dynamic axis" 
running transversally (see Michel Butor's comments in Repertoire [Paris: Minuit, 1960- ], vol. 
3, "Le carre et son habitant"). One can also consult Michel Fried's article on Pollock's line, 
Three American Painters (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1965), and Henry Miller's 
discussion of Nash's line, On Turning Eighty (London: Village Press, 1973).

 

90.  "There was something tense, exasperated to the point of intolerable anger, in his 

good-humored breast, as he played the finely-spun peace-music. The more exquisite the 
music, the more perfectly he produced it, in sheer bliss; and at the same time, the more intense 
was the maddened exasperation within him"; D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod (New York: 
Thomas Seltzer, 1922), p. 16. 

91.  Although Luciano Berio indicates otherwise, it seems to us that his work, Visage, is 

composed according to the three states of faciality: first, a multiplicity of sound bodies and 
silhouettes, then a short symphonic and dominant organization of the face, and finally a 
launching of probe-heads in all directions. However, there is no question here of music "imi-
tating" the face and its avatars, or of the voice constituting a metaphor. Instead, the sounds 
accelerate the deterritorialization of the face, giving it a properly acoustical power, and the 
face reacts musically by in turn inducing a deterritorialization of the voice. This is a molecu-
lar face, produced by electronic music. The voice precedes the face, itself forms the face for 
an instant, and outlives it, increasing in speed—on the condition that it is unarticulated, 
asignifying, asubjective. 

92.  Will Grohman, Paul Klee (New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d.): "Somewhat paradoxi-

cally he remarked that perhaps it had been his good fortune to develop painting, at least on the 
formal plane, to the stage reached in music by Mozart" (p. 71). 

93.  Dominique Fernandez, La rose des Tudors (Paris: Julliard, 1976) (and the novel 

Porporino [Paris: Grasset, 1974]). Fernandez cites pop music as a timid return to great English 
vocal music. It would be necessary to take into consideration techniques of circular breathing, 
in which one sings breathing in as well as out, or of sound filtering using zones of resonance 
(nose, forehead, cheekbones—a properly musical use of the face). 

94.  Marcel More, Le dieu Mozart et le monde des oiseaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). 
95.  As we have seen, imitation can be conceived either as a resemblance of terms culmi-

nating in an archetype (series), or as a correspondence of relations constituting a symbolic 
order (structure); but becoming is not reducible to either of these. The concept of mimesis is 
not only inadequate, it is radically false. 

96.  Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967): "I took the dra-

matic licence of not having the birds scream at all" (p. 224). 

97.  See Ernesto de Martino, La terredu remords (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 142-170. 

Martino, however, retains an interpretation based on the archetype, imitation, and 
identification. 

98.  Jean Claude Larouche, Alexis le trotteur (Montreal: Ed. du Jour, 1971). They quote 

this account: "He didn't play music with his mouth like one of us; he had a huge harmonica we 
couldn't even play. ... When he played with us, he would decide all of a sudden to double us. 
In other words, he doubled the beat; in the time we played one beat, he played two, which 
required extraordinary wind" (p. 95). 

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NOTES TO PP. 306-315 □ 547

 

99. [

TRANS

:

 

See Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Knopf, 

1976).]

 

100.  [

TRANS

:

 

See 7, "Year Zero: Faciality," pp. 167-191.] 

101.  Andre Tetry, Les outils chez les etres vivants (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), the chapter on 

"musical instruments," with bibliography. An animal's movement or labor may make noise, 
but we speak of a musical instrument whenever animals use apparatuses whose sole function 
is to produce various sounds (the musical character, to the extent that it is determinable, is 
quite variable, as is the case with the vocal apparatus of birds; there are veritable virtuosos 
among insects). From this standpoint, we distinguish: (1) stridulatory apparatuses, of the 
stringed instrument type: the rubbing of a rigid surface against another surface (insects, crus-
taceans, spiders, scorpions, pedipalps); (2) percussive apparatuses, of the drum, cymbal, or 
xylophone type: direct application of muscles to a vibratory membrane (crickets and certain 
fish). Not only is there an infinite variety of apparatuses and sounds, but the same animal 
varies its rhythm, tonality, intensity according to still more mysterious urgencies. "It then be-
comes a song of anger, anxiety, fear, triumph, love. When there is keen excitation, the rhythm 
of the stridulation varies: in Crioceris lilii, the frequency of the rubbing goes from 228 strokes 
per minute to 550 or more." 

102.  Gisele Brelet, "Musique contemporaine en France," in Histoire de la musique, ed. 

Roland Manuel, "Pleiade" (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), vol. 2, pp. 1166. 

103.  A text by Henry Miller for Varese, The Air-ConditionedNightmare (New York: New 

Directions, 1945), pp. 176-177. 

11.1837: Of the Refrain

 

1.  Fernand Deligny, Voix et Voir, Recherches, no. 8 (April 1975), on the way in which, 

among autistic children, a "line of drift" deviates from the customary path and begins to 
"vibrate," "toss about," "yaw." 

2.  Paul Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay, intro. Herbert Reed (London: Faber, 

1966), p. 43 [translation modified to agree with the French version cited by the authors]. See 
Henri Maldiney's comments in Regard, parole, espace (Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, 1973), 
pp. 149-151. 

3.  On the musical nome, the ethos, and the ground or land, notably in polyphony, see 

Joseph Samson in Histoire de la musique, ed. Roland Manuel (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), vol. 
2, pp. 1168-1172. One may also refer to the role in Arab music of the "maqam," which is 
both a modal type and a melodic formula: Simon Jargy, La musique arabe (Paris: PUF, 
1971), pp. 55ff. 

4.  Gaston Bachelard, La dialectique de la dur'ee (Paris: Bovin, 1936), pp. 128-129. 

Emphasis added. 

5.  Jakob Johann von Uexkiill, Mondesanimauxet mondehumain (Paris: Gonthier, 1965). 
6.  "Their glorious dress is constant.... The coloring of coral fish is distributed in large, 

sharply contrasting areas of the body. This is quite different from the color patterns not only 
of most fresh-water fish but of nearly all less aggressive and less territorial fish.... Like the 
colors of the coral fish, the song of the nightingale signals from a distance to all members of its 
species that a territory has found an owner." Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie 
Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), pp. 19-20. 

7.  Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology,  trans. Erich Klinghammer (New York: Holt, 

Rinehart and Winston, 1975): on monkeys, p. 487; on rabbits, p. 346; on birds, p. 171: "Zebra 
finches with colorful plumage maintain a certain distance from one another, while all-white 
birds of the same species perch much closer together." 

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548 D NOTES TO PP. 315-325

 

8.  W. H. Thorpe, Learning and Instinct in Animals (London: Methuen, 1956), p. 364 

(Fig. 2). 

9.  Lorenz has a constant tendency to present territoriality as an effect of intraspecific 

aggression; see On Agression, pp. 38-39, 42-43, 53-54, 161-162. 

 

10.  On the aesthetic and vital primacy of "having," see Gabriel Tarde, L'opposition 

universelle (Paris: Alcan, 1897). 

11.  Details on Messiaen's conceptions of bird song, his evaluation of its aesthetic quali-

ties, and his methods for both reproducing it and using it as a material are to be found in 

Claude Samuel, Conversations with Olivier Messiaen, trans. Felix Aprahamian (London: 

Stainer and Bell, 1976), and in Antoine Golea, Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris: 

Julliard, 1961). In particular, on why Messiaen does not use a tape recorder or sonograph as 

ornithologists usually do, see Samuel, pp. 61-63. 

12.  [

TRANS

:

 

Lorenz, On Aggression, p. 87.] 

13.  On all of these points, see Claude Samuel, Conversations, chapter 4. On the "rhythmic 

character," see pp. 36-39. 

14.  Pierre Boulez, "Le temps re-cherche," in Das Rheingold Programmheft, vol. 1 

(Bayreuth, 1976), pp. 5-15. 

15.  [

TRANS

:

 

Proust, The Captive, vol. 3 of Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott 

Moncrief, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 156. 

Translation modified.] 

16.  On mannerism and chaos, baroque dances, and the relation of schizophrenia to man-

nerism and dance, see Evelyne Sznycer, "Droit de suite baroque," in Schizophrenic et art, ed. 

Leo Navratil (Paris: Ed. Complexe, 1978). 

17.  Lorenz, On Aggression, pp. 39-40. On the three rhythmic personages defined respec-

tively as active, passive, and witness, see Messiaen and Golea, Rencontres, pp. 90-91. 

18.  [

TRANS

:

 

Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed 

(New York: World, 1963), pp. 242-243.] 

19.  [

TRANS

:

 

This "close embrace" of energies recalls Proust's description of Vinteuil's little 

phrase; The Captive, p. 262.] 

20.  On "the primary intuition of the earth as a religious form" (p. 242), see Eliade, Pat-

terns in Comparative Religion, pp. 245ff.; on the center of the territory, see pp. 374ff. Eliade 

makes it clear that the center is simultaneously outside the territory, very difficult to attain, 

and inside the territory, within our immediate reach. 

21.  Biologists have often made a distinction between two factors of transformation: those 

of the mutation type, and processes of isolation or separation, which may be genetic, geo-

graphical, or even psychical. Territoriality would be a factor of the second type. See Lucien 

Cuenot, L'espece(Paris: G. Doin, 1936). 

22.  Paul Geroudet, Lespassereaux, 3 vols. (Paris: Delachaux et Niestle, 1951-1957), vol. 

2, pp. 88-94. 

23.  In On Aggression, Lorenz makes a clear distinction between "anonymous flocks" such 

as schools of fish, which form milieu blocks; "local groups," where recognition occurs only 

inside the territory and, at its strongest, between "neighbors"; and finally, societies founded 

on an autonomous "bond." 

24.  K. Immelmann, Beitr'age zu einer vergleichenden Biologie australischer Prachtfinken, 

Zoologische Jahrbucher; Abteilung fur Systematik, Okologie und Geographic de Tiere, 90 

(1962). 

25.  Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology, p. 225: "Carrying nesting material for nest building evolved 

into the male courtship actions using grass stems. This was again secondarily reduced in some 

species and became rudimentary, while at the same time the song, which originally served the 

function of staking out a territory, also underwent a change in function. These animals are gre- 

background image

 

NOTES TO PP. 325-329 D 549

 

garious and are not really territorial. Instead of courting with grass stems, these males sing 

softly while sitting next to the females." Eibl-Eibesfeldt, however, interprets the grass-stem 

behavior as a vestige.

 

26.  See  L'Odyss'ee sous-marine de I'equipe Cousteau, film no. 36, La marche des 

langoustes (L. R. A.), commentary by Cousteau-Diole: spiny lobsters along the northern coast 

of the Yucatan Peninsula sometimes leave their territories. They assemble, at first in small 

groups, before the first winter storm, and before any sign detectable by human instruments. 

When the storm comes, they form long march processions, in single file, with a leader that is 

periodically relieved and a rearguard (the speed of the march is five-eighths of a mile per hour, 

for sixty miles or more). This migration does not seem to be associated with egg laying, which 

does not take place until six months later. Hernnkind, a lobster specialist, hypothesizes that 

this is a "vestige" from the last ice age (more than 10,000 years ago). Cousteau leans toward a 

more current interpretation, even mentioning the possibility that it is a premonition of a new 

ice age. The factual issue is that in this exceptional case the lobsters' territorial assemblage 

opens onto a social assemblage, and that this social assemblage is connected to cosmic forces, 

or, as Cousteau says, "pulsations of the earth." But "the enigma remains entirely unsolved," 

all the more so because this lobster procession occasions a slaughter by fishermen, and also 

because lobsters cannot be tagged since they shed their shells. 

27.  The best book of nursery rhymes, and on nursery rhymes, seems to be Les complines 

de langue francaise, with the commentary by editors Jean Beaucomot, Franck Guibat, et al. 

(Paris: Seghers, 1970). The territorial character of nursery rhymes appears in such privileged 

examples as "Pimpanicaille," two distinct versions of which exist in Gruyeres on "the two 

sides of the street" (pp. 27-28); but it is a nursery rhyme in the strict sense only when there is a 

distribution of specialized roles in a game, and the formation of an autonomous game assem-

blage that reorganizes the territory. 

28.  Nikolaas Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969). 

29.  On the one hand, the experiments of W. R. Hess have shown that there is not a cere-

bral center but instead points that are concentrated in one zone and disseminated in another, 

and are capable of inciting the same effect; conversely, the effect may change according to the 

duration and intensity of the excitation of a point. On the other hand, E. von Hoist's experi-

ments on "deafferented" fish demonstrate the importance of central nervous coordination in 

fin rhythms; Tinbergen's schema takes these interactions into account only secondarily. The 

hypothesis of a "population of oscillators" or a "pack of oscillating molecules" forming sys-

tems of articulation from the inside, independent of any common measure, is most compel-

ling in view of the problem of circadian rhythms. See A. Reinberg, "La chronobiologie," 
Sciences, vol. 1(1970); and T. van den Dreissche and A. Reinberg, "Rythmes biologiques," in 
Encyclopedia Universalis, vol. 14, p. 572: "It does not seem possible to reduce the mechanism 

of circadian rhythmicity to a simple sequence of elementary processes." 

30.  Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vin-

tage, 1972): on indirect interactions and their nonlinear character, pp. 69-71 and 76-77; on 

corresponding molecules that are least two-headed, pp. 68-69; on the inhibiting or releasing 

character of these interactions, pp. 63-67. Circadian rhythms also depend on these character-

istics (see the chart in the Encyclopedia Universalis under "Rhythmes biologiques"). 

31.  Eugene Dupreel elaborated a set of original notions, "consistency" (in relation to 

"precariousness"), "consolidation," "interval," "intercalation." See Theorie de la consolida-
tion: La cause et I'intervalle 
(Brussels: M. Lamertin, 1933); La consistance et la probabilite 
objective  
(Brussels: Academie Royale de Belgique, 1961); Esquisse d'une philosophic des 
valeurs 
(Paris: Alcan, 1939); Bachelard, in La dialectique de la dur'ee, draws on Dupreel. 

32.  [

TRANS

:

 

The Diary of Virginia Woolf ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 

1980), vol. 3, p. 209.] 

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550 □ NOTES TO PP. 330-342

 

33.  On the song of the chaffinch, and the distinction between the "subsong" and "full 

song," see Thorpe, Learning and Instinct, pp. 420-426. 

34.  Alexander James Marshall, Bower-Birds (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1954). 
35.  Thorpe, Learning and Instinct, p. 426. In this respect, songs present an entirely differ-

ent problem than calls, which are often not very differentiated, and quite similar from species 
to species. 

36.  Raymond Ruyer, La genesedes formes vivantes (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), chapter 7. 
37.  In particular, on widow birds (Viduinae), parasitic birds whose territorial song is 

species-specific and whose courtship song is learned from their adoptive host, see J. Nicolai, 
Der Brutparasitismus der Viduinae, Z. Tierps., vol. 21 (1964). 

38.  The participation of a black hole in an assemblage appears in numerous examples of 

inhibition, or fascination-ecstasy, notably in the peacock: "The male peacock spreads his tail 
feathers.... Then he bends the spread-out tail forward and points downward with his beak, 
while his head is still upright. As a result, the female runs in front of him and pecks in a search-
ing manner on the ground in the focal point of the concave mirrorlike shape of the fanned tail. 
The male peacock points, so to speak, with his fanned-out tail toward imaginary food," 
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology, p. 116. But the peacock's focal point is no more imaginary than 
the finch's grass stem is a vestige or symbol; it is an assemblage converter, the passage to a 
courtship assemblage, in this instance, effected by a black hole. 

39.  Ruyer, La genese des formes vivantes, pp. 54ff. 
40.  Francow Meyer, Problematique de revolution (Paris: PUF, 1954). 
41.  Monod, Chance and Necessity. 
42.  Female birds, which do not normally sing, start singing when they are administered 

male sex hormones, "and they will sing the song of the species on which they have become 
imprinted." Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ethology, p. 265. 

43.  [

TRANS

:

 

Klee, On Modern Art, p. 43. Translation modified to agree with the French 

translation cited by the authors.] 

44.  Klee, On Modern Art, p. 55 [translation modified—Trans.]. 
45.  See Renaissance, manierisme, baroque, Actes du Xle stage international de Tours 

(Paris: Vrin, 1972), part 1, "Periodizations." 

46.  Proust, Swann's Way, in vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past, p. 382 [translation 

modified—Trans.]. 

47.  See the ambiguous role of the friend at the end of Das Lied von der Erde. Or 

Eichen-dorff s poem in Schumann's lied, Zwielicht (in Opus 39): "If you have a friend in this 
world, do not trust him at this hour, for even if he is kind in eye and mouth, he dreams of war in 
deceitful peace." (On the problem of the One-Alone, or "solitary Being," in German 
romanticism, see Holderlin, "Le cours et la destination de l'homme en general," trans. 
Emmanuel Marineau, Poesie, no. 4 [1978], pp. 6-22.) 

48.  "The people in Mussorgsky's Boris do not form a true crowd; at times one group sings, 

then another, and then a third, each in turn, and most often in unison. As for the people in 
Maitres chanteurs, it is not a crowd but an army that is powerfully organized in the German 
manner and marches in rows. What I would like is something sparser, more divided, more 
relaxed, more impalpable, something in appearance inorganic and yet at bottom ordered." 
Quoted by Jean Barraque, Debussy (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 159. This problem—how to do a 
crowd—obviously recurs in other arts also, painting, cinema, etc. One may refer in particular 
to the films of Eisenstein, which proceed by this type of very special group individuation. 

49.  On the relations between the cry, the voice, the instrument, and music as "theater," see 

Berio's statements introducing his records. One will recall the eminently musical Nietzschean 
theme of a multiple cry of all superior men, at the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 

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NOTES TO PP. 342-350 □ 551

 

50.  On Bartok's chromaticism, see Gisele Brelet's study in Histoire de la musique, vol. 2, 

pp. 1036-1072. 

51.  In his book on Debussy, Barraque analyzes the "dialogue of the wind and the sea" in 

terms offerees instead of themes: pp. 153-154. See Messiaen's statements on his own works: 

sounds are no longer anything more "than vulgar means of expression intended to make dura-

tions measurable." 

52.  Odile Vivier describes Varese's procedures for treating sound matter, in Varese (Paris: 

Seuil, 1973): the use of pure sounds acting as a prism (p. 36); mechanisms of projection onto a 

plane (pp. 45 and 50); non-octave-forming scales (p. 75); the "ionization" procedure (pp. 

98ff.); the theme of sound molecules, the transformations of which are determined by forces 

or energies (passim). 

53.  See the interview with Stockhausen on the role of synthesizers and the effectively 

"cosmic" dimension of music, in Le Monde, July 21,1977: "Work with very limited materials 

and integrate the universe into them through a continuous variation." Richard Pinhas has 

written an excellent analysis of the possibilities of synthesizers in this regard, in relation to 

pop music: "Input, Output," in Atem, no. 10 (1977). 

54.  The definition of fuzzy aggregates brings up all kinds of problems because one cannot 

appeal to a local determination: "The set of all objects on this table" is obviously not a fuzzy 

set. Mathematicians concerned with the question speak only of "fuzzy subsets" because the 

reference set must always be an ordinary set. See Arnold Kaufmann, Introduction to the The-
ory of Fuzzy Subsets, 
foreword L. A. Zadeh, trans. D. L. Swanson (New York: Academic Press, 

1975), and Hourya Sinacoeur, "Logique et mathematique du flou," Critique, no. 372 (May 

1978), pp. 512-525. In considering fuzziness as the characteristic of certain sets, our point of 

departure was a functional, as opposed to a local, definition: sets of heterogeneous elements 

that have a territorial, or rather territorializing, function. But this is a nominal definitiion that 

does not take "what happened" into account. The real definition can come only at the level of 

processes affecting the fuzzy set; a set is fuzzy if its elements belong to it only by virtue of spe-

cific operations of consistency and consolidation, which themselves follow a special logic. 

55.  Paul Klee, On Modern Art, p. 53: "The legend of the childishness of my drawing must 

have originated from those linear compositions of mine in which I tried to combine a concrete 

image, say that of a man, with the pure representation of the linear element. Had I wished to 

present man 'as he is,' then I should have had to use such a bewildering confusion of lines that 

pure elementary representation would have been out of the question. The result would have 

been vagueness beyond recognition." 

56.  Paul Virilio, L'insecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975), p. 49. Henry Miller devel-

ops this theme in The Time of the Assassins. A Study ofRimbaud(Norfolk, Conn.: J. Laughlin, 

1956), and in the text he wrote for Varese, "Lost! Saved!" (The Air-Conditioned Nightmare 

[New York: New Directions, 1945]). It is undoubtedly Miller who has taken the modern figure 

of the writer as cosmic artisan the farthest, particularly in Sexus. 

57.  On the relation of colors to sound, see Messiaen and Samuel, Conversations, pp. 

15-17. Messiaen faults drug users for oversimplifying the relation, which they make into a 

relation between a noise and a color, instead of isolating complexes of sounds-durations and 

complexes of colors. 

58.  On the crystal, or the crystalline type, added and subtracted values, retrograde 

motion, see also Messiaen's texts in Samuel, Conversations, and those of Paul Klee in his 

diary, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, ed. and intro. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of 

California Press, 1964). 

59.  See Roland-Manuel's article, "L'evolution de l'harmonie en France et le renouveau de 

1880" (pp. 867-879), and the article by Delage on Chabrier (pp. 831-840), in Histoire de la 
musique, 
vol. 2. And especially, Brelet's article on Bartok: "Are not the difficulties learned 

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552 □ NOTES TO PP. 350-355

 

music experiences in utilizing popular music due to this antinomy between melody and 
theme? Popular music is melody, in its fullest sense, melody persuading us that it is 
self-sufficient and is in fact synonymous with music itself. How could it not refuse to bend to 
the learned development of a musical work pursuing its own ends? Many symphonies inspired 
by folklore are only symphonies about  a popular theme, to which the learned 
development remains alien and exterior. The popular melody could never constitute a true 
theme; and that is why, in popular music, the melody is the entire work, and why once it is 
over it has no other resource than to repeat itself. But can't the melody transform itself into 
a theme? Bartok solves this problem, which was thought insoluble" (p. 1056).

 

60.  Marcel More, Ledieu Mozart etlemondedesoiseaux(Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 168. 

And, on the crystal, pp. 83-89. 

61.  See Alban Berg's famous analysis of "Reverie" in Ecrits (Paris: Ed. du Rocher, 1957), 

pp. 44-64. 

12.1227: Treatise on Nomadology—the War Machine

 

1.  Georges Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna (Paris: Gallimard, 1948 [forthcoming in English 

translation from Zone Books]). On nexum and mutuum, the bond and the contract, see pp. 
118-124. 

2.  "The first pole of the State (Varuna, Uranus, Romulus) operates by magic bond, sei-

zure, or immediate capture: it does not wage battles, and has no war machine, it binds, and 
that is all." Its other pole (Mitra, Zeus, Numa) appropriates an army but imposes upon it 
juridical and institutional rules that become nothing more than a piece in the State apparatus: 
thus Mars-Tiwaz is not a warrior god, but a god who is a "jurist of war." See Dumezil, 
Mitra-Varuna, pp. 113ff., 148ff., 202ff. 

3.  Dumezil, The Destiny of the Warrior, trans. Alf Hiltebeital (Chicago: University of 

Chicaga Press, 1970). 

4.  For the role of the warrior as one who "unties" and opposes both the magic bond and 

the juridical contract, see Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna, pp. 124-132. See also the analysis of furor 
in the works of Dumezil. 

5.  [

TRANS

:

 

The first quote is from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, sec-

ond essay, sect. 17, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 
p. 86; the second is from Franz Kafka, "An Old Manuscript," The Complete Stories, ed. 
Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken, 1983), p. 416.] 

6.  Luc de Heusch emphasizes the public nature of Nkongolo's actions, in contrast to 

the secrecy of the actions of Mbidi and his son; in particular, the former eats in public, whereas 
the others hide during their meals. Later, we will see the essential relation of the war machine 
with the secret, which is as much a matter of principle as a result: espionage, strategy, diplo-
macy. Commentators have often underlined this link. Le roi ivre ou I'origine de I'Etat (Paris: 
Gallimard, 1972). 

7.  For an analysis of the three sins in the cases of the Indian god Indra, the Scandina-

vian hero Starcatherus, and the Greek god Hercules, see Dumezil, Mythe et epopee, vol. 2, pp. 
17-19 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). See also Dumezil, The Destiny of the Warrior. 

8.  Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna, p. 13 5. Dumezil analyzes the dangers and causes of the con-

fusion, which could be due to economic variables. See pp. 153, 159. 

9.  [

TRANS

:

 

Richard III, act I, scene i, line 158.] 

10. On Ajax and the tragedy of Sophocles, see the analysis of Jean Starobinski, Trois 

Fureurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Starobinski explicitly raises the question of war and the 
State.

 

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NOTES TO PP. 356-362 □ 553

 

11.  These themes are analyzed by Mathieu Carriere in an as yet unpublished study of 

Kleist. 

12.  Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: 

Uri-zen, 1977), and "Archeologie de la violence: la guerre dans les societes primitives" 
and "Malheur du guerrier sauvage" in Recherches d'anthropologie politique (Paris: Seuil, 
1980), pp. 171 -208, 209-248. In the last text, Clastres depicts the destiny of the warrior in 
primitive society and analyzes the mechanism that prevents the concentration of power 
(in the same way that Mauss demonstrated that the potlatch was a mechanism preventing 
the concentration of wealth). 

13.  Jacques Meunier, Les gaminsde Bogota (Paris: Lattes, 1977), p. 159 ("blackmail for 

dispersion") and p. 17 7: if necessary, "it is the other street children who, by means of a compli-
cated interplay of humiliations and silence, get the idea across that he must leave the gang." 
Meunier emphasizes the degree to which the fate of the ex-gang member is jeopardized: not 
only for health reasons, but because he finds it hard to integrate himself into the criminal 
underworld, a society too hierarchical, too centralized, too centered on organs of power for 
him to fit into (p. 178). On child gangs, see also the novel by Jorge Amado, Capitaes de areia 
(Sao Paolo: Livraria Martins, 1944). 

14.  See I. S. Bernstein, "La dominance sociale chez les primates" in La Recherche, no. 91 

(July 1978). 

15.  Clastres, Society against the State, p. 169: "The emergence of the State brought about 

the great typological division between Savage and Civilized man; it created the unbridgeable 
gulf whereby everything was changed, for, on the other side, Time became History." In order 
to account for this emergence, Clastres cites first a demographic factor ("but there is no ques-
tion of replacing an economic determinism with a demographic determinism"; p. 180), then 
the possibility of a warring machine (?) running amok; he also cites, more unexpectedly, the 
indirect role of a certain mode of prophetic speech, which, directed first against the "chiefs," 
produces a formidable new kind of power. But one obviously cannot prejudge more elabo-
rated solutions Clastres might have found for this problem. On the possible role of prophetic 
speech, refer to Helene Clastres, La terre sans mal, le prophetisme tupi-guarani (Paris: Edi-
tions du Seuil, 1975). 

16.  Michel Serres, La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrece. Fleuves et turbu-

lences (Paris: Minuit, 1977). Serres was the first to make the first three points given in the text; 
the fourth seems to follow from them. 

17.  [

TRANS

:

 

According to Serres, the clinamen, or declination of the atom, is the "mini-

mal angle leading to the formation of a vortex, and appears by chance in a laminar flow" (La 
naissance de la physique, 
p. 14). The clinamen is the angle between a curve and its tangent, or 
"the smallest [angle] one can make, preventing anything from coming between the two lines 
which form it.... In other words, the angle appears at the same time as curvature" (p. 18). 
"The clinamen is a differential" (p. 11).] 

18.  [

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:

 

A flow is laminar when, "no matter how small we make the layers (or lamel-

lae) into which we divide the flow, they remain strictly parallel to one another in their move-
ments"; Serres, ibid., p. 12.] 

19.  [

TRANS

:

 

Turba "designates a multitude, a large population, confusion and tumult." 

Turbo "is a round form in  movement... a  revolving cone or vortical spiral."  "The  origin  of 
things and the beginning of order consists simply in the subtle passage from turba to turbo"; 
Serres, ibid., pp. 38-39.] 

20.  This is the distinction Pierre Boulez makes between two kinds of space-time in 

music: in striated space, the measure can be irregular or regular, but it is always assignable; in 
smooth space, the partition, or break, "can be effected at will." Boulez on Music Today, trans. 

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554 □ NOTES TO PP. 362-366

 

Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 
p. 85.

 

21.  Greek geometry is thoroughly marked by the opposition between these two poles, 

the theorematic and problematic, and by the relative triumph of the former: in his Commen-
tary of the First Book of Euclid's Elements, 
trans, and intro. Glenn R. Murrow (Princeton, 
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), Proclus analyzes the difference between the poles, 
taking the Speusippus-Menaechmus opposition as an example. Mathematics has always been 
marked by this tension also; for example, the axiomatic element has confronted a proble-
matic, "intuitionist," or "constructivist" current emphasizing a calculus of problems very dif-
ferent from axiomatics, or any theorematic approach. See Georges Bouligand, Le d'eclin des 
absolus mathematico-logiques 
(Paris: Ed. d'Enseignement Superieur, 1949). 

22.  Paul Virilio, L'insecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975), p. 120: "We know that 

the youth of geometry, geometry as free, creative investigation, came to an end with Ar-
chimedes. . .. The sword of a Roman soldier cut the thread, tradition says. In killing geo-
metrical creation, the Roman State lay the foundation for the geometrical imperialism of 
the West." 

23.  With Monge, and especially Poncelet, the limits of sensible, or even spatial, repre-

sentation (striated space) are indeed surpassed, but less in the direction of a symbolic power 
(puissance) of abstraction than toward a transspatial imagination, or a transintuition (conti-
nuity). See Leon Brunschvicg's commentary on Poncelet, Les etapes de la philosophic 
mathematique 
(Paris: PUF, 1947). 

24.  Michel Serres (La naissance de la physique, pp. 105-107) analyzes the opposition 

d'Alembert-Bernoulli from this point of view. More generally, what is at issue is the difference 
between two models of space: "In the Mediterranean basin there is a shortage of water, and he 
who harnesses water rules. Hence that world of physics in which the conduit is essential, and 
the clinamen seems like freedom because it is precisely a turbulence that rejects forced flow. 
Incomprehensible to scientific theory, incomprehensible to the master of the waters.... 
Hence the great figure of Archimedes: the master of floating bodies and military machines" 
(p. 106). 

2 5. See Ben veniste, "The Notion of Rhythm in Its Linguistic Expression" in Problems in 

General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami 
Press, 1971), pp. 281-288. This text, often considered decisive, seems ambiguous to us 
because it invokes Democritus and atomism without dealing with the hydraulic question, and 
because it treats rhythm as a "secondary specialization" of the form of the body (p. 286).

 

26.  Anne Querrien, Devenir fonctionnaire ou le travail de I'Etat (Paris: Cerfi). We have 

drawn from this book, as well as from unpublished studies by Anne Querrien. 

27.  See Raoul Vergez, Les illumines de I'art royal. Huit siecles de compagnonnages 

(Paris: Julliard, 1976), p. 54. [

TRANS

:

 

In the present context, trait refers to the cutting line fol-

lowed by the artisan and to the working sketch of the construction under way. Vergez gives the 
following definition: "The Trait is a kind of graphic poem derived from geometry, which indi-
cates the building plan in sketches drawn with precision on the ground, showing sections, ele-
vations and all other projections, the three dimensions of a volume"; p. 86.] 

28.  Gerard Desargues, Oeuvres (Paris: Leiber, 1864). See also the text by Michel Chasles 

[Apercu historique sur I'origine et le developpement de methodes en geometrie... (Brussels: 
M. Hayez, 1837)—Trans.], which establishes a continuity between Desargues, Monge, and 
Poncelet as the "founders of a modern geometry." 

29.  Anne Querrien, Devenir fonctionnaire, pp. 26-27: "Is the State founded upon the col-

lapse of experimentation?. . . The State is not under construction, its construction sites must 
be short-lived. An installation is made to function, not to be socially constructed: from this 

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NOTES TO PP. 366-371 □ 555

 

point of view, the State involves in the construction only those who are paid to implement or 

command, and who are obliged to follow the model of a preestablished experimentation."

 

30.  On the question of the "Colbert lobby," see Daniel Dessert and Jean-Louis Journet, 

"Le Lobby Colbert. Un royaume, ou une affaire de famille?" Annates,  30, no. 6 

(November-December 1975), pp. 1303-1336. 

31.  See Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz 

Rosenthal (Princeton, N J.: Princeton University Press, 1967). One of the essential themes of 

this masterpiece is the sociological problem of the esprit de corps, and its ambiguity. Ibn 

Khaldun contrasts bedouinism (the bedouin life-style, not the ethnic group) with sedentarity 

or city living. The first aspect of this opposition is the inverted relation between the public and 

the secret: not only is there a secrecy of the bedouin war machine, as opposed to the publicity 

of the State city dweller, but in the first case "eminence" is based on a secret solidarity, while in 

the second case the secret is subordinated to the demands of social eminence. Second, 

bedouinism brings into play both a great purity and a great mobility of the lineages and their 

genealogy, whereas city life makes for lineages that are very impure, and at the same time rigid 

and fixed: Solidarity has a different meaning at either pole. Third, and this is the main point, 

bedouin lineages mobilize an esprit de corps and integrate into it, as a new dimension: this is 
asablyah,  or  ikhtilat,  from which the Arabic word for socialism is derived (Ibn Khaldun 

stresses the absence of any "power" residing in the tribal chief, who has no State constraints at 

his disposal). On the other hand, in city living the esprit de corps becomes a dimension of 

power and is adapted for "autocracy." 

32.  The principal texts of Husserl are Ideas, trans. W. R. Gibson (New York: Humanities 

Press, 1976), part 1, sec. 74, and Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, 

trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., ed. David B. Allison (Stoney Brook, N.Y.: N. Hayes, 1978) (with 

Derrida's very important commentary, pp. 118-132). On the issue of a vague yet rigorous sci-

ence, we may refer to the formula of Michel Serres, in his commentary on the geometrical fig-

ure called the salinon: "It is rigorous, anexact. And not precise, exact or inexact. Only a 

metrics is exact" (Naissance de la physique, p. 29). Gaston Bachelard's book Essai sur la 
connaissance approch'ee 
(Paris: Vrin, 1927) remains the best study of the steps and procedures 

constituting a rigor of the anexact, and of their creative role in science. 

33.  Gilbert Simondon has contributed much to the analysis and critique of the 

hylo-morphic schema and of its social presuppositions ("form corresponds to what the 

man in command has thought to himself, and must express in a positive manner when he 

gives his orders: form is thus of the order of the expressible"). To the form-matter schema, 

Simondon opposes a dynamic schema, that of matter endowed with singularities-forces, or 

the energetic conditions at the basis of a system. The result is an entirely different 

conception of the relations between science and technology. See L'individu et sa genese 
physico-biologique 
(Paris: PUF, 1964). 

34.  In Timaeus, 28-29, Plato entertains for an instant the thought that Becoming is not 

simply the inevitable characteristic of copies or reproductions, but could itself be a model 

rivaling the Identical and the Uniform. He states this hypothesis only in order to reject it; for 

it is true that if becoming is a model, not only must the duality of the model and the copy, of 

the model and reproduction, disappear, but the very notions of model and reproduction tend 

to lose all meaning, [

TRANS

:

 

Deleuze develops this point in "Plato and the Simulacrum," trans. 

Rosalind Krauss, October, 27 (Winter 1983), pp. 45-56. See especially p. 53.] 

3 5. [

TRANS

:

 

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: 

Vintage, 1968), sec. 630(1885), p. 336.]

 

36. The situation is in fact more complex than that, and gravity is not the only feature of 

the dominant model: there is heat in addition to gravity (already in chemistry, combustion is 

coupled with weight). Even so, the problem was to know to what extent the "thermal field"

 

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556 □ NOTES TO PP. 371-379

 

deviated from gravitational space, or on the contrary was integrated with it. Monge is a typical 

example; he began by grouping heat, light, and electricity as "variable affections of bodies," 

the concern of "specific physics," while general physics would deal with extension, gravity, 

and movement. It was only later that Monge unified all of the fields under general physics 

(Anne Querrien).

 

37.  Serres, La naissance de la physique, p. 65. 

38.  Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley: University of California 

Press, 1971), p. 88. 

39.  Albert Lautman has shown quite clearly how Riemann spaces, for example, admit a 

Euclidean conjunction making it possible at all times to define the parallelism of two neigh-

boring vectors; this being the case, instead of exploring a multiplicity by legwork, the multipli-

city is treated as though "immersed in a Euclidean space with a sufficient number of 

dimensions." See Les sch'emas de structure (Paris: Hermann, 1938), pp. 23-24, 43-47. 

40.  In Bergson, the relations between intuition and intelligence are very complex, and 

they are in perpetual interaction. Bouligand's theme is also relevant here: the dualism of the 

two mathematical elements, the "problem" and the "global synthesis," is developed only 

when they enter a field of interaction in which the global synthesis defines the "categories" 

without which the problem would have no general solution. See Le d'eclin des absolus 
math'ematico-logiques.
 

41.  Marcel Detienne, in Les maitres de v'erit'e dans la Grece archdique (Paris: Maspero, 

1973), clearly articulates these two poles of thought, which correspond to the two aspects of 

sovereignty according to Dumezil: the magico-religious speech of the despot or of the "old 

man of the sea," and the dialogue-speech of the city. Not only are the principal character types 

of Greek thought (the Poet, the Physicist, the Philosopher, the Sophist, etc.) situated in rela-

tion to these poles, but Detienne interposes between the two poles a distinct group, the Warri-

ors, which brings about transition or evolution. 

42.  There exists a Hegelianism of the right that lives on in official political philosophy 

and weds the destiny of thought to the State. Alexandre Kojeve ("Tyranny and Wisdom," in 

Leo Strauss, On Tyranny [New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963]) and Eric Weil (Hegel et 
I'Etat. Philosophiepolitique 
[Paris: Vrin, 1974]) are its recent representatives. From Hegel to 

Max Weber there developed a whole line of reflection on the relation of the modern State to 

Reason, both as rational-technical and as reasonable-human. If it is objected that this ration-

ality, already present in the archaic imperial State, is the optimum of the governors them-

selves, the Hegelians respond that the rational-reasonable cannot exist without a minimum of 

participation by everybody. The question, rather, is whether the very form of the 

rational-reasonable is not extracted from the State, in a way that necessarily makes it right, 

gives it "reason" (lui donner necessairement "raison"). 

43.  On the role of the ancient poet as a "functionary of sovereignty," see Dumezil, 

Servius et la Fortune (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 64ff., and Detienne, Les maitres de v'erit'e, 

pp. 17ff. 

44.  See Michel Foucault's analysis of Maurice Blanchot and the form of exteriority of 

thought: "La pensee du dehors," Critique, no. 229 (June 1966), pp. 523-548. 

45.  Nietzsche,  Schopenhauer as Educator, in  Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. 

Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 177-178. 

46.  A curious text of Karl Jaspers, entitled Descartes und die Philosophie (Berlin: W. de 

Gruyter, 1956), develops this point of view and accepts its implications. 

47.  Kenneth White, Intellectual Nomadism. The title of the second volume of this 

unpublished work is Poetry and Tribe. 

48.  [

TRANS

:

 

Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, trans. Louise Varese (Norfolk, Conn.: 

New Directions, 1952), pp. 9, 13, 17, 39.] 

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NOTES TO PP. 380-384 □ 557

 

49.  Anny Milovanoff, "La seconde peau du nomade," Nouvelles litt'eraires, no. 2646 

(July 27, 1978), p. 18: "The Larbaa nomads, on the border of the Algerian Sahara, use the 

word triga, which generally means road or way, to designate the woven straps serving to rein-

force the cords holding the tent to the stakes.... In nomad thought, the dwelling is tied not to a 

territory but rather to an itinerary. Refusing to take possession of the land they cross, the 

nomads construct an environment out of wool and goat hair, one that leaves no mark at the 

temporary site it occupies.... Thus wool, a soft material, gives nomad life its unity.... 

Nomads pause at the representation of their journeys, not at a figuration of the space they 

cross. They leave space to space.... Woolly polymorphism." 

50.  See W. Montgomery Watt, Mohammed at Medina (London: Oxford University 

Press, 1956), pp. 85-86, 242. 

51.  Emmanuel Laroche, Histoire de la ratine "Nem " en grec ancien (Paris: Klincksieck, 

1949). The root "Nem" indicates distribution, not allocation, even when the two are linked. 

In the pastoral sense, the distribution of animals is effected in a nonlimited space and implies 

no parceling out of land: "The occupation of shepherd, in the Homeric age, had nothing to do 

with a parceling of land; when the agrarian question came to the foreground, in the time of 

Solon, it was expressed in an entirely different vocabulary." To take to pasture (nemo) refers 

not to a parceling out but to a scattering, to a repartition of animals. It was only after Solon 

that Nomos came to designate the principle at the basis of the laws and of right (Thesmo'i and 

Dike), and then came to be identified with the laws themselves. Prior to that, there was instead 

an alternative between the city, or polis, ruled by laws, and the outskirts as the place of the 

nomos. A similar alternative is found in the work of Ibn Khaldun: between hadara as city liv-

ing, and badiya as nomos (not the town, but the preurban countryside, the plateau, steppe, 

mountain, or desert). 

52.  Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 

abridged by D. C. Somerwell, vol. 1, pp. 164-186: "They flung themselves upon the Steppe, 

not to escape beyond its bounds but to make themselves at home on it" (p. 168). 

53.  See Pierre Hubac, Les nomades (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1948), pp. 26-29 

(although Hubac tends to confuse nomads and migrants). 

54.  On the nomads of the sea, or of the archipelago, Jose Emperaire writes: "They do not 

grasp an itinerary as a whole, but in a fragmentary manner, by juxtaposing in order its various 

successive stages, from campsite to campsite in the course of the journey. For each of these 

stages, they estimate the length of the crossing and the successive changes in direction mark-

ing it." Les nomades de la mer (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 225. 

55.  Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (London: Longmans, Green, 1959), pp. 112-113, 

125, 165-166. 

56.  See the two admirable descriptions, of the sand desert by Wilfred Thesiger and of the 

ice desert by Edmund Carpenter, in Eskimo (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964): the 

winds, and tactile and sound qualities; the secondary character of visual data, particularly the 

indifference of the nomads to astronomy as a royal science; and yet the presence of a whole 

minor science of qualitative variables and traces. 

57.  EmileFelixGautier,Le passe del'AfriqueduNord (Paris: Payot, 1952), pp. 267-316. 

58.  From this perspective, Clastres's analysis of Indian prophetism can be generalized: 

"On one side, the chiefs, on the other, and standing against them, the prophets. ... And the 

prophetic machine worked perfectly well since the karai were able to sweep astonishing 

masses of Indians along behind them.. .. the insurrectional act of the prophets against the 

chiefs conferred on the former, through a strange reversal of things, infinitely more power 

than was held by the latter." Society against the State, pp. 184-185. 

59.  One of the most interesting themes of the classic work by Paul Alphandery (La 

chretiente et Videe de croisade [Paris: Albin Michel, 1959] is his demonstration that the 

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558 D NOTES TO PP. 384-386

 

changes in course, the pauses, the detours were an integral part of the Crusade: "this army of 

crusaders that we envision as a modern army, like those of Louis XIV or Napoleon, marching 

with absolute passivity, obeying the will of a diplomatic officer and staff. Such an army knows 

where it is going, and when it makes a mistake, it is not for lack of reflection. A history more 

attentive to differences accepts a more realistic image of the army of the Crusade. The army of 

the Crusade was freely, sometimes anarchically alive. ... This army was motivated from 

within, as a function of a complex coherence by virtue of which nothing happened by chance. 

It is certain that the conquest of Constantinople had its reason, necessity and a religious char-

acter, like the other deeds of the Crusades" (vol. 2, p. 7). Alphandery shows in particular that 

the idea of a battle against the Infidel, at any point, appeared early on, along with the idea of 

liberating the Holy Land (vol. 1, p. 219).

 

60.  Modern historians have been inspired to fine analyses by this confrontation between 

the East and the West, which began in the Middle Ages (and is tied to the question, Why did 

capitalism develop in the West and not elsewhere?). See especially Fernand Braudel, Capital-
ism and Material Life, 1400-1800, 
trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 

pp. 97-108; Pierre Chaunu, L'expansion europeenne du Xllle au XVe siecle (Paris: PUF, 

1969), pp. 334-339 ("Why Europe? Why not China?"); Maurice Lombard, Espaces et reseaux 
du hautMoyen Age 
(The Hague: Mouton, 1971), chapter 8 (and p. 219: "What is called defor-

estation in the East is named clearing in the West. The first deep cause of the shift of the domi-

nant centers from the East to the West is therefore a geographical reason: forest-clearing 

proved to have more potential than desert-oasis"). 

61.  Marx's observations on the despotic formations of Asia have been confirmed by the 

African analyses of Max Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 

1959): at the same time immutability of form and constant rebellion. The idea of a "transfor-

mation" of the State indeed seems to be a Western one. And that other idea, the "destruction" 

of the State, belongs much more to the East and to the conditions of a nomad war machine. 

Attempts have been made to present the two ideas as successive phases of revolution, but 

there are too many differences between them and they are difficult to reconcile; they reflect 

the opposition between the socialist and anarchist currents of the nineteenth century. The 

Western proletariat itself is perceived from two points of view: as having to seize power and 

transform the State apparatus (the point of view of labor power), and as willing or wishing for 

the destruction of the State (this time, the point of view of nomadization power). Even Marx 

defines the proletariat not only as alienated (labor) but as deterritorialized. The proletariat, in 

this second perspective, appears as the heir to the nomad in the Western world. Not only did 

many anarchists invoke nomadic themes originating in the East, but the bourgeoisie above all 

were quick to equate proletarians and nomads, comparing Paris to a city haunted by nomads 

(see Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of 
the Nineteenth Century, 
trans. Frank Jellenck [New York: H. Fertig, 1973], pp. 362-366). 

62.  See Lucien Musset, Les invasions. Le secondassaut (Paris: PUF, 1965), for example, 

the analysis of the Danes' three "phases," pp. 135-137. 

63.  Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e], 

1986), pp. 12-13 andpassim. Not only is the "town" unthinkable apart from the exterior flows 

with which it is in contact, and the circulation of which it regulates, but specific architectural 

aggregates, the fortress, for example, are veritable transformers, by virtue of their interior 

spaces, which allow an analysis, prolongation, or restitution of movement. Virilio concludes 

that the issue is less confinement than the management of the public ways, or the control of 

movement. Foucault was already moving in this direction with his analysis of the naval hospital 

as operator and filter; see Discipline and Punish, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: 

Vintage, 1975), pp. 143-146. 

64.  On Chinese, and Arab, navigation, the reasons behind their failure, and the impor- 

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NOTES TO PP. 386-390 □ 559

 

tance of this question in the East-West "dossier," see Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 
pp. 300-309, and Chaunu, L'expansion europeenne, pp. 145-147.

 

65.  Virilio gives a very good definition of the fleet in being and its historical conse-

quences: "The fleet in being... is the permanent presence in the sea of an invisible fleet able 
to strike no matter where and no matter when ... it is a new idea of violence that no longer 
comes from direct confrontation... but rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evalu-
ation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification 
of their dynamic efficiency... .Henceforth it is no longer a question of crossing a continent or 
an ocean from one city to the next, one shore to the next. The fleet in being creates ... the 
notion of displacement without destination in space and time.... The strategic submarine 
has no need to go anywhere in particular; it is content, while controlling the sea, to remain 
invisible . .. the realization of the absolute, uninterrupted, circular voyage, since it involves 
neither departure nor arrival... .If, as Lenin claimed,'strategy means choosing which points 
we apply force to,' we must admit that these 'points', today, are no longer geostrategic 
strongpoints, since from any given spot we can now reach any other, no matter where it might 
be... geographic localization seems to have definitively lost its strategic value, and, inversely, 
that this same value is attributed to the delocalization of the vector, of a vector in permanent 
movement"; Speed and Politics, pp. 38,40-41,134-135. Virilio's texts are of great importance 
and originality in every respect. The only point that presents a difficulty for us is his assimila-
tion of three groups of speed that seem very different to us: (1) speeds of nomadic, or revolu-
tionary, tendency (riot, guerrilla warfare); (2) speeds that are regulated, converted, appropri-
ated by the State apparatus (management of the public ways); (3) speeds that are reinstated by 
a worldwide organization of total war, or planetary overarmament (from the fleet in being to 
nuclear strategy). Virilio tends to equate these groups on account of their interactions and 
makes a general case for the "fascist" character of speed. It is, nevertheless, his own analyses 
that make these distinctions possible. 

66.  Jean-Pierre Vernant in particular has analyzed the connection between the Greek 

city-state and a homogeneous geometrical extension, Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs (Paris: 
Maspero, 1971 -1974), vol. 1, part 3. The problem is necessarily more complicated in relation 
to the archaic empires, or in relation to formations subsequent to the classical city-state. That 
is because the space in question is very different. But it is still the case that the number is sub-
ordinated to space, as Vernant suggests with regard to Plato's ideal state. The Pythagorean or 
Neoplatonic conceptions of number envelop imperial astronomical spaces of a type other 
than homogeneous extension, but they maintain the subordination of the number; that is why 
Numbers become ideal, but not strictly speaking "numbering." 

67.  Dumezil stresses the role played by the arithmetic element in the earliest forms of 

political sovereignty. He even tends to make it a third pole of sovereignty. See Servius et la For-
tune 
and Le troisieme souverain (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1949). But the role of this arithmetic 
element is, rather, to organize a matter; in so doing it submits that matter to one or the other of 
the two principal poles. 

68.  Karl von Clausewitz stresses the secondary role of geometry, in tactics and in strat-

egy: On War, trans. Michael Howard, Peter Paret, and Bernard Brodie (Princeton, N. J.: 
Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 214-216 ("The Geometrical Factor"). 

69.  See one of the most profound ancient texts relating the number and direction to the 

war machine, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, The Records of the Grand Historian, trans. Burton Watson (New 
York: Columbia University Press, 1961), vol. 2, pp. 155-193 ("The Account of the 
Hsiung-nu"). 

70.  Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (New York: Berkley Books, 1977), p. 212. One may 

refer to the characteristics proposed by Julia Kristeva to define the numbering number: 

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560 □ NOTES TO PP. 390-399

 

"arrangement," "plural and contingent distribution," "infini-point," "rigorous approxima-

tion," etc. Semeiotike. Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 293-297.

 

71.  Boris Iakovlevich Vladimirtsov, Le regime social des Mongols, trans. Michel Carsow 

(Paris: Maisonneuve, 1948). The term used by Vladimirtsov, "antrustions," is borrowed from 

the Saxon regime, in which the king's company, or "trust," was composed of Franks. 

72.  A particularly interesting case is that of a special body of smiths among the Tuareg, 

called the Enaden (the "Others"); the Enaden are thought to have been originally Sudanese 

slaves, Jewish settlers in the Sahara, or descendants of the knights of Saint Louis. See Rene 

Pottier, "Les artisans sahariens du metal chez les Touareg," in Techniques et civilisations, vol. 

(M'etaux et civilisations), no. 2 (1945), pp. 31-40. 

73.  Feudalism is no less a military system than so-called military democracy; but both 

systems assume an army integrated into some kind of State apparatus (for feudalism, it was 

the Carolingian land reform). It is Vladimirtsov who developed a feudal interpretation of the 

nomads of the steppe, whereas Mikhail Griaznov, The Ancient Civilization of Southern 
Siberia, 
trans. James Hogarth (New York: Cowles, 1969), leans toward military democracy. 

But one of Vladimirtsov's main arguments is that the organization of the nomads becomes 

feudal precisely to the extent that it is in disintegration, or is integrated into the empires it 

conquers. He himself remarks that in the beginning the Mongols did not organize the seden-

tary land they took over into fiefs, true or false. 

74.  J. F. C. Fuller, Armament and History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945), 

p. 5. 

75.  Paul Virilio, "Metempsychose du passager," Traverses, no. 8 (May 1977), pp. 11-19. 

Virilio, however, asserts that there was an indirect transition from hunting to war: when 

women served as "portage or pack" animals, which already enabled the hunters to enter into a 

relation of "homosexual duel" transcending the hunt. But it seems that Virilio himself invites 

us to make a distinction between speed, as projector and projectile, and displacement, as 

transport and portage. The war machine is defined from the first point of view, while the sec-

ond relates to the public sphere. The horse, for example, is not a part of the war machine if it 

serves only to transport men who dismount to do battle. The war machine is defined by 

action, not transport, even if the transport reacts upon the action. 

76.  J. F. C. Fuller, Armaments and History, pp. 137ff., shows that the First World War 

was first conceived as an offensive war of movement based on artillery. But artillery was 

turned against artillery, forcing immobility. It was not possible to reinstate mobility in the war 

through "ever-increasing shell fire" (p. 138) since the craters made the terrain all the harder to 

negotiate. The solution, to which the English, and General Fuller in particular, made decisive 

contributions, came in the form of the tank: the tank, a "landship" (p. 139), reconstituted a 

kind of maritime or smooth space on land, and "superimposed naval tactics on land warfare" 

(p. 140). As a general rule, military response is never in kind: the tank was the response to artil-

lery, the helicopter to the tank, etc. This makes for an innovation factor in the war machine 

that is very different from innovation in the work machine. 

77.  On this general distinction between the two models, "work-free action," "consum-

ing force/conserving force," "real effect/formal effect," etc., see Martial Gueroult's expo-

sition, Dynamique et metaphysique leibniziennes (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934), pp. 55, 

119 ff., 222-224. 

78.  Marcel Detienne, "La phalange, problemes et controverses," in Problemes de la 

guerre en Grece ancienne (Civilisations et societes, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The 

Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 119-143: "Technology is in a way internal to the social and the 

mental," (p. 134). 

79.  On the stirrup and the plow, see Lynn Townsend White, Jr., Medieval Technology and 

Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), chapters 1 and 2. Similarly, it has 

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NOTES TO PP. 399-406 □ 561

 

been shown in the case of dry rice cultivation in Asia that the digging stick, the hoe, and the 

plow depend upon collective assemblages that vary according to population density and the 

fallow period. This enables Braudel to conclude: "The tool, according to this theory, is the 

result and no longer the cause"; Capitalism and Material Life, p. 116.

 

80.  Treatises on martial arts remind us that the Ways, which are still subject to the laws of 

gravity, must be transcended in the void. Kleist's About Marionettes, trans. Michael Lebeck 

(Mindelheim: Three Kings Press, 1970), without question one of the most spontaneously ori-

ental texts in Western literature, presents a similar movement: the linear displacement of the 

center of gravity is still "mechanical" and relates to something more "mysterious" that con-

cerns the soul and knows nothing of weight. 

81.  See Paul Pelliot, "Les systemes d'ecriture en usage chez les anciens Mongols," Asia 

Major 2 (1925), pp. 284-289: The Mongols used the Uighur script, with the Syriac alphabet (it 

was the Tibetans who produced a phonetic theory of Uighur writing); the two versions of the 
Secret History of the Mongols that have been passed down to us are a Chinese translation and a 

phonetic transcription in Chinese characters. 

82.  Georges Charriere, Scythian Art (New York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1979), p. 

185 [translation modified]. 

83.  See Lucien Musset, Introduction a la runologie (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1965). 
84.  There are, of course, forms of cooking and architecture that are part of the nomad 

war machine, but they fall under a different "trait," one distinguishing them from their seden-

tary form. Nomad architecture, for example, the Eskimo igloo orthe Hunnish wooden palace, 

is a derivative of the tent: its influence on sedentary art came by way of domes and 

half-domes, and above all of space starting very low, as in a tent. As for nomad cooking, it 

consists literally of break-fast (the paschal tradition is nomadic). And it is under this trait that it 

can be part of a war machine: for example, the Janissaries used a cooking pot as their rallying 

point; there were different ranks of cooks, and their hat had a wooden spoon through it. 

85.  Itisinthe Trait'edu rebelle (Paris: Bourgois, 1981) that Jiinger takes his clearest stand 

against national socialism and develops certain points contained in Der Arbeiter: a concep-

tion of the "line" as an active escape passing between the two figures of the old Soldier and the 

modern Worker, carrying both toward another destiny in another assembly (nothing of this 

remains in Heidegger's notion of the Line, although it is dedicated to Jiinger). 

86.  Lynn White, Jr., who is actually not inclined to ascribe much power of innovation 

to the nomads, sometimes establishes extensive technological lineages with surprising 

origins: he traces hot-air and turbine technologies to Malaya (Medieval Technology and 
Social Change, 
p. 95 and note): "Thus a chain of technological stimuli may be traced back 

from some of the major figures of early modern science and technology through the later 

Middle Ages to the jungles of Malaya. A second, and related, Malay invention, the fire pis-

ton, may have had significant influence upon the European understanding of air pressure 

and its applications." 

87.  On the particularly thorny question of the stirrup, see Lynn White, Jr., Medieval 

Technology and Social Change, chapter 1. 

88.  See the fine article by A. Mazaheri, "Le sabre contre l'epee," Annates 13, no. 4 

(October-December 1958), pp. 669-686. 

89.  Henri Limet, Le travail du metal au pays de Sumer au temps de la life dynastie d'Ur 

(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1960), pp. 33-40. 

90.  Along these lines, Mazaheri effectively demonstrates that the saber and sword 

belong to two distinct technological lineages. In particular, damasking (damassage), which 

does not come from Damascus at all, but rather from the Greek or Persian word for diamond, 

designates the treatment of cast steel that makes it as hard as a diamond and the designs in this 

steel resulting from the crystallization of the cement ("true damask was made in the centers 

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562 □ NOTES TO PP. 406-414

 

that had never experienced Roman domination"). But on the other hand, damascening 
(damasquinage), 
which did come from Damascus, designates only inlay in metal (or in fab-

ric), intentional designs imitating damasking using entirely different means.

 

91.  Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Milieu et techniques (Paris: Albin Michel, 1945), pp. 356ff. 

Gilbert Simondon, discussing short series, takes up the question of the "absolute origins of a 

technological lineage," or of the creation of a "technical essence": Du mode d'existence des 
objects techniques 
(Paris: Aubier, 1969), pp. 41-49. 

92.  On the mold-modulation relation, and the way in which molding hides or contracts 

an operation of modulation that is essential to matter-movement, see Simondon, Du mode 
d'existence, 
pp. 2 8-50 ("modulation is molding in a continuous and perpetually variable man-

ner"; p. 42). Simondon clearly shows that the hylomorphic schema owes its power not to the 

technological operation but to the social model of work  subsuming that operation (pp. 

47-49). 

93.  Simondon feels no special attraction for the problems of metallurgy. His analysis is 

not, in fact, historical and prefers to deal with examples drawn from electronics. But, histori-

cally, there is no electronics without metallurgy. Thus Simondon pays homage to metallurgy: 

"Metallurgy does not entirely accommodate itself to an analysis using the hylomorphic 

schema. The fixing of the form is not accomplished visibly in a single stroke, but in several 

successive operations; the forging and quenching of steel are anterior and posterior, respec-

tively, to the fixing of the form in the strict sense; forging and quenching are, nevertheless, 

operations that constitute objects" (L'individu, p. 59). 

94.  Not only must myths be taken into account, but also positive history, for example, 

the role of "the brass" in the evolution of musical form; or again, the constitution of a "metal-

lic synthesis" in electronic music (Richard Pinhas). 

95.  Wilhelm Worringer defines Gothic art in terms of a geometrical line that is "primi-

tive" but has taken on life. But this vitality is not organic, as it will be in the classical world: this 

line "embodies no organic expression.. . it is nevertheless of the utmost vitality... .Since this 

line is lacking in all organic timbre, its expression of life must, as an expression, be divorced 

from organic life.. . The pathos of movement which lies in this vitalized geometry—a pre-

lude to the vitalized mathematics of Gothic architecture—forces our sensibility to an effort 

unnatural to it." Form in Gothic (London: Putnam's and Sons, 1927), pp. 41-42. 

96.  This is one of the essential points of V. Gordon Childe's argument in The Prehistory 

of European Civilization (London: Cassell, 1962): the metallurgist is the first specialized arti-

san, whose sustenance is made possible by the formation of an agricultural surplus. The rela-

tion of the smith to agriculture has to do not only with the tools smiths manufacture but also 

with the food they take or receive. The Dogon myth, as analyzed in its variants by Griaule, can 

be seen as marking this relation, in which the smith receives or steals grains, and hides them in 

his mallet. 

97.  Maurice Lombard, Lesm'etauxdansI'ancien  mondedu VeauXIesiecle(TheHague: 

Mouton, 1974), pp. 75, 255. 

98.  The social position of the smith has been the object of detailed studies; for Africa in 

particular see the classic study by W. B. Cline, "Mining and Metallurgy in Negro Africa," Gen-
eral Series in Anthropology, 
no. 5 (1937); and Pierre Clement, "Le forgeron en Afrique noire," 
Revue de geographie humaine et d'ethnologie, no. 2 (April-June 1948), pp. 35-58. But these 

studies are hardly conclusive; the better defined the principles invoked—"reaction of con-

tempt," "of approbation," "of apprehension"—the hazier and more overlapping the results, 

as seen in Clement's tables. 

99.  See Jules Bloch, Les Tziganes, Que sais-je?, no. 580 (Paris: PUF, 1969). Bloch dem-

onstrates precisely that the distinction between sedentaries and nomads becomes secondary 

in connection with cave dwelling. 

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NOTES TO PP. 414-421 □ 563

 

100.  Elie Faure, Medieval Art, vol. 2 of History of Art, trans. Walter Pach (Garden City, 

N.Y.: Garden City Publishing, 1937), pp. 12-14. 

101.  On these peoples and their mysteries, see the analyses of V. Gordon Childe, The Pre-

history of European Society, chapter 7 ("Missionaries, Traders and Warriors of Temperate 

Europe"), and The Dawn of European Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1958). 

102.  Maurice Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Le renard pale, vol. 1 (Paris: Institut 

d'ethnologie, 1965), p. 376. 

103.  The book by Robert James Forbes, Metallurgy in Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1950), 

analyzes the different ages of metallurgy, as well as the types of metallurgists that existed in the 

"ore stage": the "miner," who did the prospecting and mining; the "smelter" [who produced 

the crude metal or alloy]; the "blacksmith" [who manufactured mass products from crude 

metals]; and the "metalworker" [who produced smaller objects; includes gold- and silver-

smiths] (pp. 74-76). The specialization system becomes more complicated in the Iron Age, 

with attendant variations in the nomad-itinerant-sedentary distribution. 

104.  The texts of T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (New York: Doubleday, 

Doran, 1935) and "The Science of Guerrilla War," in Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed. 

(1929), vol. 10, pp. 950-953, remain among the most significant works on guerrilla warfare; 

they present themselves as an "anti-Foch" theory and elaborate the notion of the nonbattle. 

But the nonbattle has a history that is not entirely dependent on guerrilla warfare: (1) the 

traditional distinction between the "battle" and the "maneuver" in war; see Raymon Aron, 
Penser la guerre. Clausewitz (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 122-131; (2) the way in 

which the war of movement places the role and importance of the battle in question (as early 

as Marshal de Saxe, and the controversial question of the battle during the Napoleonic 

Wars); (3) finally, more recently, the critique of the battle in the name of nuclear arms, which 

play a deterrent role, with conventional forces now having a role only in "testing" or "man-

euver"; see the Gaullist conception of the nonbattle, and Guy Brossollet, Essai sur la 
non-bataille 
(Paris: Belin, 1975). The recent return to the notion of the battle cannot be 

explained simply by technological factors such as the development of tactical nuclear arms, 

but implies political considerations—it is upon these that the role assigned to the battle (or 

nonbattle) in war depends. 

105.  On the fundamental differences between Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, see Rene 

Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes, trans. Naomi Walford (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers 

University Press, 1970), pp. 417-419. 

106.  See Armees etfiscalit'e dans le monde antique, ed. A. Chastagnol, C. Nicolet, and 

H. van Effenterre (Paris: CNRS, 1977); this colloquium best covers the fiscal aspect but 

deals with the other two as well. The question of the distribution of land to soldiers and the 

families of soldiers comes up in every State and plays an essential role. In one particular form, 

it lay the foundation for fiefs and feudalism. But it already lay at the basis of "false fiefs" 

around the world, most notably of the clews  and cleruchy in Greek civilization. Claire 

Preaux, L'economie royale des Lagides (Brussels: Ed. de la Fondation Egyptologique Reine 

Elisabeth, 1939), pp. 463ff. 

107.  Clausewitz, On War, especially book 8, and the commentary on these three theses by 

Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, vol. 1 (particularly pp. 139 ff., "Pourquoi les guerres de la 

deuxieme espece?"). 

108.  Erich Ludendorff, Der totale Krieg (Munich: Ludendorff Verlag, 1935), notes that 

the evolution has been toward attributing more and more importance to the "people" and 

"domestic policies" in war, whereas Clausewitz still puts the emphasis on armies and foreign 

policy. This criticism is true overall, despite certain texts of Clausewitz. The same criticism is 

also made by Lenin and the Marxists (although they obviously have a totally different concep-

tion of the people and domestic policy than Ludendorff). Certain authors have convincingly 

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564 □ NOTES TO PP. 421-428

 

demonstrated that the proletariat is as much of military origin, naval in particular, as of indus-
trial origin; see, for example, Virilio, Speed and Politics, pp. 38, 40-41, 134-35.

 

109.  As John Ulric Nef shows, it was during the great period of "limited war" (1640-1740) 

that the phenomena of concentration, accumulation, and investment emerged—the same 
phenomena that were later to determine "total war." See War and Human Progress (New 
York: Norton, 1968). The Napoleonic code of war represents a turning point that brought 
together the elements of total war: mobilization, transport, investment, information, etc. 

110.  On this "transcending" of fascism, and of total war, and on the new point of inversion 

of Clausewitz's formula, see Virilio's entire analysis in L'insecurit'e du terhtoire, especially 
chapter 1. 

111.  Guy Brossollet, Essai sur la non-bataille, pp. 15-16. The axiomatic notion of the 

"unspecified enemy" is already well developed in official and unofficial texts on national 
defense, on international law, and in the judicial or police spheres. 

13. 7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture

 

1.  The principal book in this respect is Mitra-Varuna (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) (it also 

contains the analysis of the "One-Eyed" and the "One-Armed" gods). 

2.  The theme of the Binder-God and the magic knot has been the object of general stud-

ies in mythology, notably Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, trans. Philip Mairet (Kansas 
City: Sheed, Andrews, and McMeel, 1961), chapter 3. But these studies are ambiguous 
because they use a syncretic and archetypal method. Dumezil's method, on the other hand, is 
differential: the theme of capture or of the bond only groups various data together under a dif-
ferential trait, which is constituted precisely by political sovereignty. On the opposition 
between these two methods, one can refer to Edmond Ortigues, Le discours et le symbole 
(Paris: Aubier, 1962). 

3.  Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna, pp. 113-114, 151, 202-203. 
4.  Ibid., p. 150: "There are many ways of being a god of war, and Tiwaz defines one that is 

very badly expressed by the labels warrior god, god of combat... . Tiwaz is something else: the 
jurist of war, and at the same time a kind of diplomat" (the same applies for Mars). 

5.  Ibid., pp. 124-132. 
6.  Ernst Junger, The Glass Bees, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: 

Noonday Press, 1960), p. 112 [translation modified to agree with the French translation cited 
by the authors]. 

7.  Marcel Detienne, Les maitres de verite dans la Grece archaique (Paris: Maspero, 

1973), and "Le phalange, problemes et controverses," in Problemes de la guerre en Grece 
ancienne 
(Civilisations et societes, no. 11), ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant (The Hague: Mouton, 
1968). See also Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, N. Y: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1982). 

8.  Jacques Harmand cites an "enterprise using extensive manpower exceptionally 

directed by a functionary, Ouni, under the Pharaoh Pepi I toward 1400 B.C."; La guerre 
antique 
(Paris: PUF, 1973), p. 28. Even the military democracy Morgan described does not 
explain, but presupposes, an archaic State of the imperial type (the work of Detienne and 
Vernant establishes this). This imperial State itself functions first with jailers and police, and 
not warriors: see Dumezil, Mitra- Varuna, pp. 200-204. 

9.  The idea itself of an Asiatic despotic formation appeared in the eighteenth century, 

notably in Montesquieu, but was used to describe an evolved state of the empires and corre-
sponded to absolute monarchy. Entirely different is the viewpoint of Marx, who recreates the 
notion in order to define the archaic empires. The principal texts in this regard are Marx, 

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NOTES TO PP. 428-433 □ 565

 

Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 471-514; Karl Wittfogel, 
Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957); and Pierre 

Vidal-Naquet's preface to the first French edition, Le despotisme oriental (Paris: Minuit, 

1964), which was surpressed in the second edition at Wittfogel's request; Ferenc Tokei, Essays 
on the Asiatic Mode of Production 
(Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1979); and the studies in 

CERM, Sur le mode de production asiatique (Paris: Ed. Sociales, 1969).

 

10.  Varron made a famous pun on nexum and nee suumfit ( = the thing does not become 

the property of he who receives it). In effect, the nexum is a fundamental form of archaic 

Roman law, according to which it is not an accord between contracting parties that creates an 

obligation, but the borrower's or donor's word, in a magico-religious mode. This is not a con-

tract (mancipatio), and it involves no buying-selling, even deferred, and no interest, although 

it seems to us that it may involve a kind of rent. See in particular Pierre Noailles, Fas et Jus 

(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1948); and Dumezil, who stresses the connection between the 
nexum and the magic bond, Mitra-Varuna, pp. 118-124. 

11.  See the excavations and studies of James Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations in the Near 

East (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965) and Catal HuyukQievj York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). The 

urbanist Jane Jacobs has drawn on this work in proposing an imperial model she calls "New 

Obsidian" (after the name of the lava used to make tools), which may go back to the beginning 

of Neolithic times, or even much further into the past. She stresses the "urban" origin of agri-

culture and the role of hybridizations occurring in the urban grain stocks: It is agriculture that 

presupposes the stock, and not the reverse. In an as yet unpublished study, Jean Robert ana-

lyzes Mellaart's theses and Jacobs's hypothesis, applying them to new perspectives 
(D'ecoloniser Vespace). 

12.  Clastres, Society against the State, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Urizen, 1977). 

We have seen that, according to Clastres, primitive war is one of the principal mechanisms 

warding off the State in that it maintains the opposition and dispersion of small segmentary 

groups. But also, from this viewpoint, primitive war remains subordinated to these preven-

tive mechanisms and does not become autonomous as a machine, even when it comprises a 

specialized body. 

13.  According to Griaznov, it was the sedentary farmers who went out on the steppe and 

became nomadic, during the Bronze Age: This is a case of a zigzag movement in evolution. See 
The Ancient Civilization of Southern Siberia, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Cowles, 

1969), pp. 97-98, 131-133. 

14.  Jean Robert develops this notion of an "inversion of signs and messages": "In a first 

phase, information circulates principally from the periphery toward the center, but at a cer-

tain critical point, the town begins to emit, in the direction of the rural world, increasingly 

imperative messages"; the town becomes an exporter (D'ecoloniser I'espace). 

15.  On Chinese towns and their subordination to the imperial principle, see Etienne 

Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy, trans. H. M. Wright (New Haven, Conn.: Yale 

University Press, 1964), p. 410: "The social structures in both India and China automatically 

rejected the town and offered, as it were, refractory, substandard material to it. It was because 

society was well and truly frozen in a sort of irreducible system, a previous crystallization." 

16.  From all of these standpoints, Francois Chatelet questions the classical notion of the 

city-state and doubts that the Athenian city can be equated with any variety of State: "La 

Grece classique, la Raison, I'Etat," in Alberto Asor Rosa et al., En marge. L'Occident et ses 
"autres", 
(Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978). Islam was to confront analogous problems, as 

would Italy, Germany, and Flanders beginning in the eleventh century; in these cases, politi-

cal power does not imply the State-form. An example is the community of Hanseatic towns, 

which lacked functionaries, an army, and even legal status. The town is always inside a net-

work of towns, but, precisely, "the network of towns" does not coincide with "mosaic of 

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566 □ NOTES TO PP. 433-439

 

States." On all of these points, see the analyses of Francois Fourquet and Lion Murard, Les 
equipements de pouvoir: ville, territoires et equipements collectifs 
(Paris: 10/18, 1976), pp. 

79-106.

 

17.  Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans Claire Jacobson and Brooke 

Grundfest Schoeft (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 150-151. 

18.  Louis Berthe analyzes a specific example of the need for a "third village" to prevent 

the directional circuit from closing: "Aines et cadets, l'alliance et la hierarchie chez les Baduj," 
L'Homme, vol. 5, no. 3/4 (July-December 1965), pp. 214-215. 

19.  Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800, trans. Miriam Kochan 

(New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 60), pp. 398,405,411. Emphasis added. (On town-State 

relations in the West, see pp. 396-406.) And as Braudel notes, one of the reasons for the victory 

of the States over the towns from the beginning of the fifteenth century was that the State 

alone had the ability fully to appropriate the war machine: by means of the territorial recruit-

ment of men, material investment, the industrialization of war (it was more in the arms facto-

ries than in the pin factories that mass production and mechanical division appeared). The 

commercial towns, on the other hand, required wars of short duration, resorted to mercenar-

ies, and were only able to encast the war machine. 

20.  This theme is frequently developed by Samir Amin: "Since the theory of relations 

between different social formations cannot be an economistic one, international relations, 

which belong precisely to this context, cannot give rise to an economic theory." Unequal 
Development, 
trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 146. 

21.  See Jacques Lacarriere, Les hommes ivres de Dieu (Paris: Fayard, 1975). 

22.  [

TRANS

:

 

On capitalism repelling its limits, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 

trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 

Press, 1983), pp. 230-232.] 

23.  Samir Amin analyzes this particularity of the "peripheral formations" of the Third 

World and distinguishes two principal types, the oriental and African, and the American: 

"The Americas, Asia and the Arab world, and Black Africa were not transformed in the same 

way because they were not integrated at the same stage of capitalist development at the center 

and therefore did not fulfill the same function in development." Unequal Development, p. 

295. See also Accumulation on a Worldscale, vol. 2, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly 

Review Press, 1974), pp. 390-394. We shall see, however, that under certain conditions the 

center and the periphery are determined in such a way as to exchange their characteristics. 

24.  Gaetan Pirou, Economie liberale et economie dirigee, vol. 1 (Paris: Ed. Sedes, 

1946-1947), p. 117: "The productivity of the marginal worker determines not only that 

worker's wage but that of all the others, in the same way that, when it was a question of 

commodities, the utility of the last bucket of water or last sack of wheat governed the value 

not only of that bucket or that sack but of all the other buckets and all the other sacks." 

(Marginalism seeks to quantify the assemblage, when in fact all kinds of qualitative factors are 

at work in the evaluation of the "last.") 

25.  On the importance of the theory of evaluation and feeling out for marginalism, see 

Jacques Fradin's critical discussion, Les fondements logiques de la th'eorie neoclassique de 
I'echange 
(Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1976). For Marxists, there is also a 

groping evaluation, but one that can bear only on the quantity of socially necessary labor; 

Engels speaks of this precisely in the context of precapitalist societies. He invokes "a process 

of zig-zag approximation, often groping back and forth in the dark," which is governed more 

or less by the "need for each person to have a rough idea of his costs" (one may wonder if this 

last part of the phrase does not reinstate a sort of marginalist criterion). Engels, "Supplement 

to Volume Three of Capital," in Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vin-

tage, 1981), p. 1036. 

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NOTES TO PP. 439-443 □ 567

 

26.  [

TRANS

:

 

"Ophelimity" (from the Greek for "useful," "serviceable") was introduced by 

Vilfredo Pareto in his Cows d'economie politique (1896), ed. G.-H. Bousquet and G. Busino 
(Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1964), pp. 2-16. The first portion of this discussion is translated in 
Vilfredo Pareto, Sociological Writings, ed. and intro. S. E. Fine, trans. Derick Mirtin (New 
York: Praeger, 1966), pp. 97-102.] 

27.  David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, in The Works and Correspon-

dence of David Ricardo, vol. 1, ed. Piero Sraffa (London: Cambridge University Press, 
1962), chapter 2. See also Marx's analysis of the two forms of "differential rent," Capital, 
vol. 3, part 6. 

28.  Of course, the least fertile land is also in theory the most recent or the last in a series 

(which allows many commentators to say that Ricardo prefigured marginalism in his theory 
of rent). But this is not even a rule, and Marx shows that an "increasing sequence" is just as 
possible as a "decreasing sequence" and that a better soil can "take the lowest place instead of 
that which was formerly the worst." Capital, vol. 3, p. 798. 

29.  [

TRANS

:

 

Capital, vol. 3, p. 788.] 

30.  Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, p. 75: "If air, water, the elasticity of 

steam, and the pressure of the atmosphere, were of different qualities; if they could be appro-
priated, and each quality existed only in moderate abundance, they, as well as the land, would 
afford a rent, as the successive qualities were brought into use." 

31.  The two forms of differential rent are based on comparison. But Marx maintains the 

existence of another form, unknown to the theorists (Ricardo), but with which the practition-
ers, he says, are quite familiar: absolute rent, based on the special character of landed property 
as monopoly. In effect, land is not a commodity like the others because it is not reproducible at 
the level of a determinable aggregate. There is therefore monopoly, which is not the same as 
"monopoly price" (monopoly price, and the eventual corresponding rent, are totally different 
questions). In the simplest terms, differential rent and absolute rent can be distinguished in 
the following manner: since the price of the product is calculated on the basis of the worst soil, 
the entrepreneur with the best soil would have a surplus profit if the latter were not trans-
formed into differential rent accruing to the landowner; but on the other hand, since agricul-
tural surplus value is proportionally greater than industrial surplus value (?), the agricultural 
entrepreneur in general would have a surplus profit if the latter were not transformed into 
absolute rent accruing to the landowner. Rent is thus a necessary element in the equalization 
and adjustment of profit: whether it be the equalization of the agricultural profit rate (differ-
ential rent), or the equalization of this rate and the rate of industrial profit (absolute rent). 
Certain Marxist economists have proposed an entirely different schema of absolute rent, but 
one that maintains Marx's necessary distinction, [

TRANS

:

 

On absolute rent, see Marx, Capital, 

vol. 3, part 6, chapter 45, pp. 895-899.] 

32.  Bernard Schmitt, Monnaie, salaires et profit (Paris: Castella, 1980), pp. 289-290, 

distinguishes between two forms of capture or "harnessing," which correspond moreover to 
the two principal figures of the hunt, waiting  and  pursuit.  Rent would be a residual or 
waiting kind of capture because it depends on external forces and operates by transfer; 
profit would be a capture of pursuit or conquest because it derives from a specific action and 
requires a force of its own or a "creation." This holds true, however, only in relation to differ-
ential rent; as Marx noted, absolute rent represents the "creative" aspect of landed property 
(Capital, vol. 3, p. 889). 

33.  Edouard Will, Korinthiaka (Paris: Ed. De Boccard, 1955), pp. 470ff, analyzes a late, 

but exemplary, case, that of the tyrant Cypselos's reform in Corinth: (1) a portion of the land 
belonging to the hereditary aristocracy was confiscated and distributed to the poor peasants; 
(2) but at the same time a metallic stock was constituted, through seizure of the property of 
proscribed persons; (3) this money itself was distributed to the poor, but in order for them to 

background image

 

568 □ NOTES TO PP. 443-449

 

give it to the old owners as an indemnity; (4) the old owners from then on paid their taxes in 

money, so as to ensure a circulation or turnover of the currency, and an equivalence between 

money, goods, and services. We already find analogous figures directly inscribed in the 

archaic empires, independently of the problems of private property. For example, land is dis-

tributed to the functionaries in their capacity as functionaries, and they exploit or lease it. But 

if the functionary thereby receives a rent in labor or in kind from it, he owes the emperor a tax 

payable in money. Hence the necessity of "banks," which, under complex conditions, ensure 

the equivalence, conversion, and circulation of goods-money throughout the economy; see 

Guillaume Cardascia, "Armee et fiscalite dans la Babylone achemenide," in Armees et 
fiscalit'e dans le monde antique 
(Paris: CNRS, 1977).

 

34.  [

TRANS

:

 

On these three forms of rent, see Marx, Capital, vol. 3, part 6, chapter 47, 

pp. 925-938.] 

35.  Authors like Will and Gabriel Ardant have demonstrated that the commercial func-

tion does not account for the origin of money, tied to ideas of "payment," "settlement," "tax-

ation." Will proves this in particular for the Greek and Western worlds; but even in the 

oriental empires, we think that the monopoly over monetarized trade assumes monetary 

taxation. See Edouard Will, "Reflexions et hypotheses sur les origines du monnayage," 
Revue numismatique, vol. 17 (1955), pp. 3-24; Gabriel Ardant, Histoire financiere de 
I'antiquite a nos jours 
(Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 28ff.: "The milieus that gave rise to taxa-

tion also gave rise to money." 

36.  On this aspect of indirect taxation, see Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, trans. 

Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp. 1-2, 228-236 (in relation to for-

eign trade). Concerning the relations taxation-trade, a particularly interesting case is that of 

mercantilism, analyzed by Eric Alliez (Capital et pouvoir, unpublished manuscript). 

37.  [

TRANS

:

 

Marx presents his trinity formula (capital-profit, land-ground rent, 

labor-wages) in Capital, vol. 3, chapter 48.] 

38.  Bernard Schmitt, Monnaie, salaires et profits. 

39.  Marx often emphasizes the following points, particularly in his analysis of primitive 

accumulation: (1) Primitive accumulation precedes the mode of production and makes it pos-

sible. (2) It therefore implies specific action by the State and the law, which are not opposed to 

violence but, on the contrary, promote it ("These methods depend in part on brute force.... 

But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society." 
Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes [New York: Vintage, 1977], chapter 31, p. 915). (3) This 

lawful violence appears first in its raw form but ceases to be conscious to the degree that the 

mode of production becomes established; it seems to be a fact of nature pure and simple 

("direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases"; ibid., p. 

899). (4) A movement such as this is explained by the particular character of this violence, 

which is in no case reducible to theft, crime, or illegality (see Notes surAdolph Wagner in 
Oeu-vres de Karl Marx, "Pleiade" edition, vol. 2, ed. Maximilien Rubel [Paris: Gallimard, 

1968]): what is taken away from the worker is not something surface level; the capitalist 

"does not limit himself to taking away or stealing, but extorts the production of a surplus 

value, in other words, he first contributes to the creation of that from which he takes away.... 

A part of the value created without the labor of the capitalist can be appropriated legally by 

the capitalist, in other words, without violating the corresponding right to the exchange of 

commodities." 

40.  Jean Robert thoroughly demonstrates, in this context, that primitive accumulation 

implies the violent construction of a homogenized, "colonized" space ("Decoloniser 

l'espace," unpublished manuscript). 

41.  Ferenc Tokei, "Les conditions de la propriete fonciere dans la Chine de l'epoque 

Tcheou," Acta Antiqua, vol. 6 (1958), pp. 245-300. Marx and Engels already noted that the 

Roman plebs (partially composed of freedmen) alone had the right to the "transfer of property 

background image

 

NOTES TO PP. 449-453 □ 569

 

out of the ager publicus" (Marx, Grundrisse, p. 477): the plebeians became private owners of 
landed property, and also of commercial and industrial wealth, precisely insofar as they were 
"excluded from all public rights" (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the 
State 
[New York: International Publishers, 1972], p. 190).

 

42.  See the two great books by V. Gordon Childe, The Most Ancient East (London: K. 

Paul, Trench, Triibner, 1928)and especially The Prehistory of European Civilization (London: 
Cassell, 1962). In particular, archaeological analysis permits Childe to conclude that nowhere 
in the Aegean world were there accumulations of wealth or food comparable to those of the 
Orient (The Prehistory of European Civilization, pp. 106-110). 

43.  On the differences between "generalized slavery" in the archaic empire, and private 

slavery, feudal corvee, etc., see Charles Parain, "Protohistoire mediterraneenne et mode de 
production asiatique," in CERM, Sur le mode de production asiatique, pp. 170-173. 

44.  Gerard Boulvert, Domestique et fonctionnaire sous le haut-empire romain (Paris: Les 

Belles Lettres, 1974). More generally, Paul Veyne has analyzed the formation of "subjective 
law" in the Roman Empire, the corresponding institutions, and the new meaning of the public 
and private. He demonstrates that Roman law is a "law without concepts" that proceeds by 
"topics," and in this sense differs from the modern, "axiomatic" conception of the law. See 
Veyne, Le pain et le cirque (Paris: Seuil, 1976), chapters 3 and 4, and p. 744. 

45.  See Francois Hincker, "La monarchic absolue francaise," in CERM, Sur lefeodalisme 

(Paris: Ed. Sociaies, 1971). 

46.  Edgar Quinet, La genie des religions, vol. 1 of Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Hachette, 

ca. 1899). 

47.  Marx, "Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy," in A Contribution to the 

Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), p. 298 
[translation modified]. 

48.  On the historical independence of the two series, and their "encounter," see Etienne 

Balibar in Althusser and Balibar, Lirele Capital, vol. 2 (Paris: Maspero, 1968), pp. 286-289. 

49.  Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, pp. 13-14, and the following passage he cites 

from Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 
1942), p. 338: "'Capital' is not simply another name for means of production; it is means of 
production reduced to a qualitatively homogeneous and quantitatively measurable fund of 
value" (whence the equalization of profit). In his analysis of the primitive accumulation of 
capital, Maurice Dobb (Studies in the Development of Capitalism, rev. ed. [New York: Inter-
national Publishers, 1964], pp. 177-186) effectively demonstrates that primitive accumula-
tion bears not on the means of production but on "rights or titles to wealth" (p. 177; modified 
to agree with the French translation cited by the authors), which, depending on the circum-
stances, are convertible into means of production. 

50.  See the distinction certain jurists make between Roman, "topical," law, and modern, 

"axiomatic," law of the civil-code type. We may define certain fundamental ways in which the 
French Civil Code is closer to an axiomatic than to a code: (1) the predominance of the 
enunciative form over the imperative and over affective formulas (damnation, exhortation, 
admonishment, etc.); (2) the code's pretension that it forms a complete and saturated rational 
system; (3) but at the same time the relative independence of the propositions, which permit 
axioms to be added. On these aspects, see Jean Ray, Essai sur la structure logique du code civil 
francais 
(Paris: Alcan, 1926). It has been established that the systematization of Roman law 
took place very late, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

51.  [

TRANS

:

 

Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. and intro. Dirk J. 

Struik, trans. Martin Mulligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 129.] 

52.  See Jean Saint-Geours, Pouvoir et finance (Paris: Fayard, 1979). Saint-Geours is one 

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570 □ NOTES TO PP. 453-463

 

of the best analysts of the monetary system, as well as of "private-public" mixes in the modern 

economy.

 

53.  On the tendency toward the elimination of ground rent in capitalism, see Samir Amin 

and Kostas Vergopoulos, La questionpaysanne et le capitalisme (Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1974). 

Amin analyzes the reasons why ground rent and rent of mines keep or assume a present-day 

meaning in the peripheral regions, although in different ways; The Law of Value and Historical 
Materialism, 
trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), chapters 4 and 6. 

54.  Introductory books on the axiomatic method emphasize a certain number of prob-

lems. For example, Robert Blanche's fine book, L'axiomatique (Paris: PUF, 1959) [abridged 

and translated by G. B. Keene as Axiomatics (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962)]. There 

is first of all the question of the respective independence of the axioms, and whether or not the 

system is saturated, or "strongly complete" (sec. 14 and 15). Second, there is the question of 

"models of realization," their heterogeneity, but also their isomorphy in relation to the axio-

matic system (sec. 12). Then there is the possibility of a polymorphy of models, not only in a 

nonsaturated system, but even in a saturated axiomatic (sec. 12, 15, and 26). Then, once 

again, there is the question of the "undecidable propositions" an axiomatic confronts (sec. 

20). Finally, there is the question of "power," by which nondemonstrable infinite sets exceed 

the axiomatic (sec. 26 and "the power of the continuum"). The comparison of politics to an 

axiomatic is based on all of these aspects. 

55.  Lewis Mumford, "The First Megamachine," Diogenes, no. 55 (July-September 1966), 

p. 3. [translation modified to agree with the French translation cited by the authors]. 

56.  Ergonomics distinguishes between "human-machine" systems (or work posts) and 

"humans-machines" systems (communicational aggregates composed of human and 

nonhuman elements). But this is not only a difference of degree; the second point of view is 

not a generalization of the first: "The notion of information loses its anthropocentric aspect," 

and the problems are not of adaptation but of the choice of a human or nonhuman element 

depending on the case. See Maurice de Montmollin, Les systemes hommes-machines (Paris: 

PUF, 1967). The issue is no longer to adapt, even under violence, but to localize: Where is your 

place? Even handicaps can be made useful, instead of being corrected or compensated for. A 

deaf-mute can be an essential part of a "humans-machines" communicational system. 

57.  One of the basic themes of science fiction is to show how machinic enslavement com-

bines with processes of subjection, but exceeds and differs from them, performing a qualita-

tive leap. Take Ray Bradbury: television not as an instrument located at the center of the 

house, but as forming the walls of the house. 

58.  See Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon ojPower, vol. 2 ofThe Myth ojthe Machine(New 

York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), pp. 236-360 (a comparison of the "old 

megama-chine" and the modern one; despite writing, the old megamachine notably suffered 

from difficulties in "communication"). 

59.  Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, p. 129. 

60.  Historically, these have been the major problems in axiomatics: "undecidable" prop-

ositions (contradictory statements are also nondemonstrable); the powers of infinite sets, 

which by nature elude axiomatic treatment ("the continuum, for example, cannot be con-

ceived axiomatically in its structural specificity since every axiomatization one can give it 

will rely on a denumerable model"). See Blanche, L'axiomatique, p. 80. 

61.  The "intuitionist" school (Brouwer, Heytig, Griss, Bouligand, etc.) is of great impor-

tance in mathematics, not because it asserted the irreducible rights of intuition, or even 

because it elaborated a very novel constructivism, but because it developed a conception of 
problems, and of a calculus of problems that intrinsically rivals axiomatics and proceeds by 

other rules (notably with regard to the excluded middle). 

62.  In our opinion, one of the best analyses of the Nazi economy is Jean-Pierre Faye's 

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NOTES TO PP. 463-472 □ 571

 

Langages totalitaires (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 664-676. Faye shows that Nazism is indeed 

a totalitarianism, precisely because of its minimal State, its refusal of any statification of the 

economy, its reduction of wages, its hostility toward large-scale public works. But at the same 

time, he shows that Nazism carries out the creation of domestic capital, strategic construc-

tion, and the building of an arms industry, which makes it rival or sometimes even meld with 

an economy of socialist leaning ("something that seems to resemble the Swedish loans praised 

by Myrdal with a view to large-scale projects, but which is in fact and immediately its oppo-

site, the writing of an arms economy and a war economy," and the corresponding difference 

between "the public works entrepreneur" and the "army supplier"; pp. 668, 674).

 

63.  See the critical list of the axioms of the periphery presented by Samir Amin, Accumu-

lation on a Worldscale, pp. 390-394. 

64.  Paul Virilio, L'ins'ecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975); Speed and Politics, trans. 

Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986); Defense populaire et luttes ecologiques 

(Paris: Galilee, 1978), forthcoming in English translation from Semiotext(e) as Popular 
Defense and Ecological Struggles: 
it is precisely beyond fascism and total war that the war 

machine finds its complete object, in the menacing peace of nuclear deterrence. It is there that 

the reversal of Clausewitz's formula takes on a concrete meaning, at the same time as State 

politics tends to wither and the war machine takes over a maximum of civil functions ("place 

the whole of civil society under the regime of military security," "disqualify the whole of the 

planet's habitat by stripping the peoples of their quality of inhabitant," "erase the distinction 

between wartime and peacetime"; see the role of the media in this respect). Certain European 

police forces could be taken as an example, when they claim the right to "shoot on sight": they 

cease to be a cogwheel in the State apparatus and become pieces in a war machine. 

65.  Braudel shows how this center of gravity formed in northern Europe, but at the out-

come of movements that, starting in the ninth and tenth centuries, put the European spaces of 

the North and the South in competition or rivalry with one another (this problem is not to be 

confused with that of the town-form and State-form, but does intersect with it). See 

"Naissance d'une economie-monde," Urbi, no. 1 (September 1979), pp. 3-20. 

66.  A movement in Marxist research formed on the basis of the work of Mario Tronti 

(Operai e capitate [Turin: G. Einaudi, 1971]; French translation, Ouvriers et capital [Paris: 

Bourgois, 1977]), then that of Italian autonomy and Antonio Negri, whose aim was to analyze 

the new forms of work and the struggle against work. It was a question of showing simultane-

ously: (1) that the struggle against work is not an accidental or "marginal" phenomenon in 

capitalism, but one essential to the composition of capital (the growth in the proportion of 

constant capital), and, (2) that this phenomenon engenders a new type of worldwide 

struggle—workers' struggles, popular struggles, ethnic struggles—in every domain. See 

Antonio Negri, especially Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, ed. Jim Fleming, 

trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizion Viano (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and 

Garvey, 1984); Karl Heinz Roth, Die "andere" Arbeiterbewegung (Munich: Trikont, 1974); 

and the current work in France of Yann Moulier, Alain and Daniele Guillerm, Benjamin 

Coriat, etc. [

TRANS

:

 

The best sources on the autonomy movement in English are Italy: 

Autonomia. Post-Political Politics, Semiotext(e), vol. 3, no. 3 (1980) and Autonomy and the 
Crisis. Italian Marxist Texts of the Theory and Praxis of a Class Movement: 1964-1979 
(Lon-

don: Red Notes and CSE Books, 1979). Marx Beyond Marx includes a lengthy epilogue by 

Michael Ryan summarizing Negri's major works and a bibliography of writings on the Italian 

movement available in English.] 

67.  This is one of the essential theses of Tronti, who defined the new conceptions of the 

"mass-worker" and of the relation to work: "To struggle against capital, the working class must 

fight against itself insofar as it is capital; this is the maximal stage of contradiction, not forthe 

workers, but for the capitalists  __  The plan of capital begins to run backward, not as a social 

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a   .,   D 

572 □ NOTES TO PP. 472-481

 

development, but as a revolutionary process." See Ouvriers et capital, p. 322; this is what Negri 
has called the "crisis of the planning state" (Crisi dello Stato-plano [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974]).

 

68. This is another aspect of the present-day situation: in addition to the new struggles 

tied to work and the evolution in work, there is the entire domain of what are called "alterna-
tive practices" and the construction of such practices (pirate radio stations would be the 
simplest example; other examples are urban community networks, the alternative to psychia-
try, etc.). On all these points, and the link between the two aspects, see Franco Berardi Bifo, 
Finalemente il cielo e caduto sulla terra (Milan: Squilibri, 1978); and Les Untorelli, 
Re-cherches, 
no. 30 (1977) (special issue on autonomia).

 

14.1440: The Smooth and the Striated

 

1.  Andre Leroi-Gourhan, L'homme el la matiere (Paris: Albin Michel, 1971), pp. 244ff. 

(and the opposition between fabric and felt). 

2.  William Faulkner, Sartoris (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 151. 
3.  On the history of the quilt and patchwork in American immigration, see Jonathan 

Holstein, American Pieced Quilts (New York: Viking, 1973) (with reproductions and bibliog-
raphy). Holstein does not claim that the quilt is the principal source of American art, but he 
does note the extent to which the "white on white" of plain quilts and patchwork composi-
tions inspired or gave impetus to certain tendencies in American painting: "We can see in 
many [quilts] such phenomena as 'op' effects, serial images, use of 'color fields,' deep under-
standing of negative space, mannerisms of formal abstraction and the like," (p. 13). 

4.  Pierre Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Bennett 

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 83ff. We provide a summary of 
Boulez's analysis in the following paragraph. 

5.  [

TRANS

:

 

Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, p. 87. Translation modified.] 

6.  On this indexing of the inside and the outside among the nomads of the desert, see 

Annie Milovanoff, "La seconde peau du nomade," Nouvelles litteraires, no. 2646 (July 27, 
1978), p. 18. And on the relations between the igloo and the outside among the nomads of the 
ice, see Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1964). 

7.  See the two convergent descriptions of the space of ice and the space of sand: Edmund 

Carpenter, Eskimo, and Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (London: Longmans, Green, 1959). 
(In both cases, there is an indifference to astronomy.) 

8.  See Pierre Chaunu's study, L'expansion europeenne du XHIe au XVe siecle (Paris: 

PUF, 1969), pp. 288-305. 

9.  See in particular Paul Adam, "Navigation primitive et navigation astronomique," in 

Les aspects internalionaux de la decouverte oceanique aux XVe et XVIe siecles. Ve Colloque 
international d'histoire maritime, 
ed. Michel Mollat and Paul Adam (Paris: SEVPEN, 1960), 
pp. 91-112. (See the operative geometry of the pole star.) 

 

10.  Guy Beaujouan, "Science livresque et nautique au XVe siecle," Les aspects 

interna-tionaux de la decouverte oceanique, pp. 61-90. 

11.  See Paul Virilio, L'ins'ecurite du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1975), on how the sea 

reconstitutes a smooth space with the "fleet in being," etc.; and how a vertical smooth 
space of aerial and stratospheric domination springs up (especially chapter 4, "Le littoral 
vertical," pp. 93-109). 

12.  Emmanuel Laroche, Histoire de la racine "Nem " en grec ancien (Paris: Klincksieck, 

1949), clearly notes the difference between the ideas of distribution and allocation, between 
the two linguistic groups concerned, between the two kinds of space, between the "province" 
pole and the "city" pole. 

13.  This expression is found in Rene Thorn, who applies it to a continuous variation in 

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NOTES TO PP. 481-493 D 573

 

which the variable reacts upon its antecedents: Modeles math'ematiques de la morphogenese 

(Paris: 10/18, 1974), pp. 218-219.

 

14.  On Riemann's and Helmholtz's presentations of multiplicity, see Jules Vuillemin, 

Philosophie de I'algebre (Paris: PUF, 1962), pp. 409ff. 

15.  See Bertrand Russell, The Principles ofMathematics (New York: Norton, 1964), chapter 

31. The following discussion does not conform to Russell's theory. An excellent analysis of the 

notions of distance and magnitude according to Meinong and Russell may be found in 

Albert Spaier, La pensee et la quantite (Paris: Alcan, 1927). 

16.  Beginning in chapter 2 of Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of 

Consciousness, trans.F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1958), Bergson repeatedly uses the 

noun "multiplicity," under conditions that should attract the attention of commentators; that 

there is an implicit reference to Riemann seems beyond doubt. Later, in Matter and Memory, 

trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Humanities Press, 1978), he 

explains that Achilles' stride can be divided perfectly into "submultiples" that differ in 

nature, however, from that which they divide; the same goes for the tortoise's stride; and the 

submultiples, "in both cases," themselves differ in nature. 

17.  See Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 82: if a multiplicity "implies the possibility of 

treating any number whatever as a provisional unit which can be added to itself, inversely the 

units in their turn are true numbers which are as big as we like, but are regarded as provision-

ally indivisible for the purpose of compounding them with one another." 

18.  Albert Lautman, Les schemas de structure (Paris: Hermann, 1938), pp. 23, 34-35. 

19.  On this properly Euclidean conjunction (which is very different from the process of 

accumulation), see Lautman, ibid., pp. 45-48. 

20.  Benoit Mandelbrot, Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension (San Francisco: W. H. 

Freeman, 1977). 

21.  On these two kinds of space, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs, 

vol. 1 (Paris: Maspero, 1971-1974), pp. 174-175. 

22.  Michel Serres, La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrece. Fleuves et turbu-

lences (Paris: Minuit, 1977): "Physics is based much more on a vectorial space than on a met-

ric space" (p. 79). On the hydraulic problem, see pp. 104-107. 

23.  Serres, La naissance de la physique, pp. 35, 135ff. 

24.  Anne Querrien has clearly demonstrated the importance of the Ecole des Ponts et 

Chaussees (School of Bridges and Roadways) in this elaboration of the concept of work. For 

example, Navier, an engineer and professor of mechanics, wrote in 1819: "We must establish a 

mechanical currency with which to estimate the quantities of work used to accomplish every 

kind of fabrication." 

25.  It is a commonplace of missionaries' narratives that there is nothing corresponding to 

the category of work, even in transhumant agriculture, with its laborious ground-clearing 

activities. Marshall Sahlins is not content to remark the briefness of the time devoted to the 

labor necessary for maintenance and reproduction, but goes on to stress qualitative factors: 

the continuous variation that regulates activity, and the mobility or freeness of movement, 

which excludes stockpiling and is measured in terms of the "convenience of transporting the 

object." "La premiere societe d'abondance," Les temps modernes, no. 268 (October 1968), 

pp. 654-656, 662-663, 672-673. 

26.  The principal texts are Alois Riegl, Die Sp'dtromische Kunstindustrie (Vienna: 

Staatdruckerei, 1927); Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy; A Contribution to the 
Psychology of Style, 
trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International Universities Press, 

1963); Henri Maldiney, Regard, parole, espace (Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, 1973), especially 

"L'art et le pouvoir du fond," and Maldiney's discussion of Cezanne. 

27.  All of these points already relate to Riemannian space, with its essential relation to 

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574 D 

NOTES TO PP. 493-498

 

"monads" (as opposed to the unitary Subject of Euclidean space): see Gilles Chatelet, "Sur 

une petite phrase de Riemann," Analytiques, no. 3 (May 1979). Although the "monads" are no 

longer thought to be closed upon themselves, and are postulated to entertain direct, 

step-by-step local relations, the purely monadological point of view proves inadequate and 

should be superseded by a "nomadology" (the ideality of striated space versus the realism 

of smooth space).

 

28.  See Edmund Carpenter's description in Eskimo of ice space, and of the igloo: "There 

is no middle distance, no perpecti ve, no outline, nothing the eye can cling to except thousands 

of smokey plumes of snow... a land without bottom or edge ... a labyrinth alive with the 

movements of crowded people. No flat static walls arrest the ear or eye ... and the eye can 

glance through here, past there" (no pagination). 

29.  These two aspects, the Encompassing Element and the Center, figure in Jean-Pierre 

Vernant's analysis of space in Anaximander; Mythe et penseee chez les Grecs (Paris: Maspero, 

1971-1974), vol. 1, part 3. From another perspective, the entire history of the desert concerns 

the possibility of its becoming the encompassing element, and also of being repelled, rejected 

by the center, as though in an inversion of movement. In a phenomenology of religion like that 

of Van der Leeuw, the nomos itself does indeed appear as the encompassing-limit or ground, 

and also as that which is repelled, excluded, in a centrifugal movement. 

30.  Whatever interactions there may be, the "art of the steppes" had a specificity that was 

communicated to the migrating Germans; in spite of his many reservations about nomad cul-

ture, Rene Grousset makes this point in The Empire of the Steppes, trans. Naomi Walford 

(New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970). pp. 11 -25. He notes the irreducibility 

of Scythian art to Assyrian art, Sarmatian art to Persian art, and Hunnic art to Chinese art. He 

even points out that the art of the steppes influenced more than it borrowed (see in particular 

the question of Ordos art and its relations to China). 

31.  On this question of light and color, in particular in Byzantine art, see Henri Maldiney, 

Regard, parole, espace, pp. 203ff., 239ff. 

32.  The correlation, "haptic-close-abstract," was already suggested by Riegl. But it 

was Worringer who developed the theme of the abstract line. Although he conceives of it 

essentially in its Egyptian form, he describes a second form in which the abstract assumes 

an intense life and an expressionist value, all the while remaining inorganic: Abstraction 
and Empathy, 
chapter 5, and especially Form in Gothic (London: Putnam's and Sons, 

1927), pp. 38-55. 

33.  Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Legesteet la parole (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964-1965), vol. 1, 

Technique et langage, pp. 263ff.; vol. 2, La m'emoire et les rythmes, pp. 219ff. ("Rhythmic 

marks are anterior to explicit figures.") Worringer's position is very ambiguous; thinking that 

prehistoric art is fundamentally figurative, he excludes it from Art, on the same grounds as he 

excludes the "scribblings of a child" (Abstraction and Empathy, pp. 51-55). Then he advances 

the hypothesis that the cave dwellers were the "ultimate result" of a series he says began with 

the abstract (p. 130). But would not such a hypothesis force Worringer to revise his conception 

of the abstract, and to cease identifying it with Egyptian geometricism? 

34.  Worringer establishes an opposition between the power of repetition, which is 

mechanical, multiplying, and without fixed orientation, and the force of symmetry, which is 

organic, additive, oriented, and centered. He sees this as the fundamental difference between 

Gothic ornamentation and Greek or classical ornamentation: Form in Gothic, pp. 53-55 

("The Ceaseless Melody of the Northern Line"). In a fine book, Esthetiques d'Orient et 
d'Occident 
(Paris: E. Leroux, 1937), Laura Morgenstern develops a particular example, dis-

tinguishing the "symmetrical antithetism" of Sassanid Persian art from the "disjointed 

antithetism" of the art of the prdto-Iranian nomads (Sarmatians). Many authors, however, 

have stressed the centered and symmetrical motifs in barbarian or nomad art. Worringer 

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NOTES TO PP. 498-499 □ 575

 

anticipated this objection: "Instead of the regular and invariably geometrical star or rosette or 

similar restful forms, in the North we find the revolving wheel, the turbine or the so-called sun 

wheel, all designs which express violent movement. Moreover, the movement is peripheral 

and not radial" (Form in Gothic, p. 54). The history of technology confirms the importance of 

the turbine in the life of the nomads. In another, bio-aesthetic, context, Gabriel Tarde opposes 

repetition as indefinite potential (puissance) to symmetry as limitation. With symmetry, life 

constituted an organism for itself, taking a star-shaped or reflected, infolded form (the radiata 

and mollusks). It is true that in doing so it unleashed another type of repetition, external 

reproduction; see L 'opposition universale (Paris: Alcan, 1897).

 

35.  [

TRANS

:

 

Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, p. 33] 

36.  [

TRANS

:

 

Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, p. 42] 

37.  On all of these points, see Georges Charriere's very intuitive book, Scythian Art (New 

York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1979), which includes a great number of reproductions. It 

is doubtless Rene Grousset who has most effectively emphasized "slowness" as a dramatic 

pole of nomad art: The Empire of the Steppes, pp. 13-14. 

38.  Dora Vallier, in her preface to the French translation of Abstraction and Empathy 

(Abstraction et Einfuhlung [Paris: Klincksieck, 1978]), is right to note Worringer and 

Kandinsky's independence from one another, and the differences between the problems they 

were addressing. However, she maintains that there is still convergence and resonance 

between them. In a sense, all art is abstract, with the figurative springing from certain types of 

abstraction. But in another sense, since there are very different types of lines 

(Egyptian-geometrical, Greek-organic, Gothic-vital, etc.), the question then becomes one of 

determining which line remains abstract, or realizes abstraction as such. It is doubtful that 

it is the geometrical line, since it still draws a figure, even though an abstract and 

nonrepresentative one. Rather, the abstract line is that defined by Michael Fried in relation to 

certain works by Pollock: multidirectional, with neither inside nor outside, form nor 

background, delimiting nothing, describing no contour, passing between spots or points, 

filling a smooth space, stirring up a close-lying haptic visual matter that "both invites the act of 

seeing on the part of the spectator yet gives his eye nowhere to rest once and for all," (Three 
American Painters 
[Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, 1965], p. 14). In Kandinsky 

himself, abstraction is realized not so much by geometrical structures as by lines of march 

or transit that seem to recall Mongolian nomadic motifs. 

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Bibliography

 

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Bibliography

 

(compiled by Brian Massumi)

 

I before an entry indicates an interview.

 

P before an entry indicates a preface, postface, introduction, or afterword.

 

by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

 

English

 

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Preface by Michel Foucault. Trans. Robert 

Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking, 1977; rpt. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1983. Translation of VAnti-Oedipe.

 

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 

Press, 1986. Translation of Kafka: Pour une litt'erature mineure.

 

Nomadology: The War Machine. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986. 

Translation of Chapter 12 of Mille Plateaux.

 

On the Line. Trans. John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Translation of "Rhizome" 

(the final version published in Mille plateaux) and "Politics" (Chapter 6 of Dialogues).

 

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: 

University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Translation of Mille Plateaux.

 

"Balance Sheet-Program for Desiring-Machines." Trans. Robert Hurley. Semiotext(e), 

Anti-Oedipus,  vol. 2, no. 5 (1977), pp. 117-135. Translation of "Bilan-programme 
pour machines desirantes."

 

"Becoming-Woman." Trans. Brian Massumi. Subjects/Objects,  no. 3 (Spring 1985), pp. 

24-32. Extracts from Chapter 10 of Mille Plateaux.

 

"A Bloated Oedipus." Trans. Rachel McComas. Semiotext(e), Polysexuality, vol. 4, no. 1

 

579

 

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5

80 D BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

(1981), pp. 97-101. Abridged translation of Chapter 2 of Kafka: Pour une litt'erature

 

mineure. "City-State." Trans. Brian Massumi. Zone, no. 1 /2 (1985), pp. 195-199. Extract 

from Chapter

 

13 of Mille Plateaux. "Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines." Trans. Charles Stivale. 

Sub/Stance, vol. 13, nos.

 

3/4 (1984), pp. 7-19. Translation of Chapter 15 of Mille Plateaux. "How to Make 

Yourself a Body without Organs." Trans. Suzanne Guerlac. Semiotext(e),

 

Polysexuality, vol. 4, no. 1(1981), pp. 265-270. Abridged translation of "Comment se 
faire

 

un corps sans organes," first version. "The Interpretation of Utterances." With Claire 

Parnet and A. Scala. Trans, and ed. Paul Foss

 

and Meaghan Morris. In Language, Sexuality and Subversion. Ed. Paul Foss and 
Meaghan

 

Morris. Sydney: Feral Publications, 1978, pp. 141-157. Papers delivered at the Milan con-
ference on Psychoanalysis and Politics (May 1973); published in Deleuze and Guattari,

 

Politique et psychanalyse. "One or Several Wolves?" Trans. Mark Seem. Semiotext(e), 

Anti-Oedipus, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977),

 

pp. 137-147. Translation of "Un seul ou plusieurs loups?", first version. "Nomad Art." 

Trans. Brian Massumi. Art and Text, no. 19 (Oct.-Dec. 1985), pp. 16-24.

 

Extracts from Chapter 14 of Mille Plateaux. "Rhizome." Trans. Paul Foss and Paul 

Patton. In Ideology and Consciousness, no. 8 (Spring

 

1981), pp. 49-71. Translation of Rhizome (the first version, published as a separate book).

 

"What Is a Minor Literature?" Trans. Robert Brinkley. Mississippi Review, vol. 2, no. 3

 

(Winter/Spring 1983), pp. 13-33. Translation of Chapter 3 of Kafka.

 

French

 

I'Anti-Oedipe. Vol. 1 of Capitalisme et schizophrenic. Paris: Minuit, 1972; 2nd ed., 1973, with 

added appendix, "Bilan-Programme pour machines desirantes."

 

Kafka: Pour une litt'erature mineure. Paris: Minuit, 1975.

 

Mille Plateaux. Vol. 2 of Capitalisme et schizophrenie. Paris: Minuit, 1980.

 

Politique et psychanalyse. Alencon: Bibliotheque des Mots Perdues, 1977. Texts from the 

Milan conference on Psychoanalysis and Politics (May 1973). Contains: "La place du 
signifiant dans l'institution," Guattari (revised version reprinted in La revolution 
moleculaire, 
and included in the English edition); "Psychanalyse et politique," Guattari; 
"Quatre propositions sur la psychanalyse," Deleuze; and "L'interpretation des enonces," 
Deleuze, Guattari, Claire Parnet, and Andre Scala.

 

Rhizome. Paris: Minuit, 1976. Modified and reprinted as the introduction to Mille Plateaux.

 

"Bilan-Programme pour machines desirantes." Minuit,  no. 2 (January 1973), pp. 1-25. 

Reprinted as appendix to second edition of I'Anti-Oedipe.

 

Discussions, in Francois Fourquet and Lion Murard, Les equipements de pouvoir (Paris: 

10/18,1976), pp. 39-47,161-195,212-227. Revised version of Recherches, no. ^Decem-
ber 1973], Les equipements collectifs.

 

"Le nouvel arpenteur. Intensites et blocs d'enfance dans 'le Chateau.'" Critique, vol. 29, no. 

318 (November 1973), pp. 1046-1054.

 

"La synthese disjonctive." L'Arc, Klossowski, no. 43 (1970), pp. 54-62. Modified and 

reprinted as Chapter 2, part 4 of VAnti-Oedipe.

 

"Un seul ou plusieurs loups?" Minuit, no. 5 (Sept. 1973), pp. 2-16. Modified and reprinted as 

Chapter 2 of Mille Plateaux.

 

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BIBLIOGRAPHY □ 581

 

by Gilles Deleuze

 

English

 

Cinema I: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneap-

olis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Translation of Cinema I: L'image-mouvement.

 

Kant's Critical Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: 

University of Minnesota Press, 1984. With preface to the English edition. Translation of 
La philosophic critique de Kant.

 

Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty. Trans Jean McNeil. New York: 

Braziller, 1971. With the text of Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Translation 
of Presentation de Sacher-Masoch.

 

Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press, 

1983. Translation of Nietzsche et la philosophie.

 

Proust and Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Braziller, 1972. Translation ofProust et 

les signes, 2nd ed.

 

"Active and Reactive." Trans. Richard Cohen. In The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison. 

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985, pp. 80-106. Translation of Chapter 2 of Nietzsche et 
la philosophie.

 

"Four Propositions on Psychoanalysis." Trans. Meaghan Morris. In Language, Sexuality and 

Subversion.  Ed. Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris. Sidney: Feral Publications, 1978, pp. 
134-140. Translation of "Quatre propositions sur la psychanalyse" in Deleuze and 
Guattari, Politique et psychanalyse.

 

"I Have Nothing to Admit." Trans. Janis Forman. Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, vol. 2, no. 3 

(1977), pp. 111-116. Translation of "Lettre a Michel Cressole."

 

"Intellectuals and Power." Discussion with Michel Foucault in Foucault, Language, 

Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. and trans. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell 
University Press, 1977, pp. 205-217. Also trans. Mark Seem, Telos 16 (Summer 1973), 
pp. 103-109. Translation of "Les intellectuels et le pouvoir."

 

"On Four Poetic Formulas Which Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy." Preface to 

Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy.

 

"Open Letter to Negri's Judges." Trans. Committee April 7, London. Semiotext(e), Italy: 

Autonomia, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980), pp. 182-184. From La Repubblica.

 

"Nomad Thought." Trans. Jacqueline Wallace. Semiotext(e), Nietzsche's Return, vol. 3, no. 1 

(1978), pp. 12-20. Translation of "Pensee nomade." Also trans. David B. Allison in The 
New Nietzsche, 
ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 198 5), pp. 142-149.

 

"Plato and the Simulacrum." Trans. Rosalind Krauss. October, no. 16 (Winter 1983), pp. 

45-56. Translation of "Platon et le simulacre." "The Rise of the Social." Foreword to 
Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 
1979, pp. ix-xvii. Translation of "L'ascension du social."

 

"The Schizophrenic and Language: Surface and Depth in Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud." 

In Textual Strategies. Ed. and trans. Josue Harari. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 
1979, pp. 277-295. Translation of "Le schizophrene et le mot." Reprinted in Literature 
and Psychoanalysis. 
Ed. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1983.

 

"Three Group Problems." Trans. Mark Seem. Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977), 

pp. 99-109. Translation of "Trois problemes de groupe."

 

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582 D BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

French

 

Le Bergsonisme. Paris: PUF, 1966.

 

Bergson. M'emoire et vie. Paris: PUF, 1957. Extracts from Bergson selected by Deleuze.

 

Cinema I: L'image-mouvement. Paris: Minuit, 1983.

 

Cinema II:L'image-temps. Paris: Minuit, 1985.

 

David Hume, la vie, son oeuvre. Paris: PUF, 1952. Extracts from Hume with an introduction

 

by Deleuze and Andre Cresson. Dialogues. With Claire 

Parnet. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. Difference et Repetition. 
Paris: PUF, 1968. Empirisme et subjectivite. Paris: PUF, 1953. 
3rded., 1980. Foucault. Paris: Minuit, 1986.

 

Francis Bacon. Logique de la Sensation. 2 vols. Paris: Ed. de la Difference, 1981. 
Instincts et Institutions. Paris: Hachette, 1953. Texts selected by Deleuze. 
Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969.

 

Nietzsche. Paris: PUF, 1965. Extracts from Nietzsche with an introduction by Deleuze. 
Nietzsche et la philosophic Paris: PUF, 1962. 4th ed., 1973. Un nouvel archiviste. 
Illustrations by d'Ipoustiguy. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972. Reprint

 

of "Un nouvel archiviste." La philosophie 

critique de Kant. Paris: PUF, 1963.

 

Presentation de Sacher-Masoch. Paris: Minuit, 1967. Rpt. Paris: 10/18, 1971. Lengthy 
introduction by Deleuze with the text of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's La Venus a lafourrure. 
Proust et les signes. 
Paris: PUF, 1964. Augmented 2nd ed., 1970. Spinoza et le probleme 
de I'expression. 
Paris: Minuit, 1968.

 

Spinoza. Philosophie pratique. Paris: PUF, 1970. Augmented 2nded. Paris: Minuit, 1981. 
Superpositions. With Carmelo Bene. Paris: Minuit, 1979. The play, Richard HI, by Bene with

 

an essay on Bene by Deleuze entitled "Un manifeste de moins." I        "A propos des 

nouveaux philosophes et d'un probleme plus general." Le Monde, June 19-20,

 

1977, p. 16. Reprinted Recherches, Les Untorelli, no. 30 (November 1977), pp. 179-184.

 

Interview from June 5, 1977. P      "L'ascension du social." Postface to Jacques 

Donzelot, La police des families. Paris: Minuit,

 

1977, pp. 220. "Capitalisme et schizophrenic" L'Arc, Deleuze, no. 49 (1972; 2nd ed., 

1980), pp. 47-55.

 

Interview with Catherine Bakis-Clement from March 2, 1972. "La conception de la 

difference chez Bergson." Etudes bergsoniennes, vol. 4 (1956), pp. 79-112. "Deux regimes de 
fous." In Psychanalyse et Semiotique. Actes du Colloque de Milan, 1974.

 

Ed. Armando Verdiglione. Paris: 10/18, 1975, pp. 165-186. Presentation by Deleuze

 

with discussion. "Ecrivain non: un nouveau cartographe." Critique, no. 343 (December 

1975), pp. 1207-1227.

 

Review of Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish). Modified and

 

reprinted as "Un nouveau cartographe" in Foucault, pp. 31-51. "En quoi la philosophie 

peut servir a des mathematiciens ou meme a des musiciens, meme et

 

surtout quand elle ne parte pas de musique ou de mathematiques," in Vincennes, ou le

 

d'esir d'apprendre. Ed. Pierre Merlin. Paris: Alain, Moreau, 1979, pp. 120-121. "Faille et 

feux locaux. Kostas Axelos." Critique no. 275 (April 1970), pp. 344-351. "Grandeur de 
Yasser Arafat." Revue d'Etudes Palestiniennes, no. 10 (Winter 1984), pp. 41-43. "L'Homme: 
une existence douteuse." Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 81 (June 1-7, 1966), pp.

 

32-34. Review of Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things). I    

"Huit ans apres." L'Arc, Deleuze, no. 49 (1972; 2nd ed., 1980), pp. 99-102. Interview with

 

Catherine Clement from 1980.

 

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BIBLIOGRAPHY □ 583

 

"Hume." In Laphilosophie, ed. Francois Chatelet. Paris: Hachette, 1979. Vol. 2, pp. 226-239. I     
"Les intellectuels et le pouvoir." L 'Arc, Deleuze, no. 49 (1972; 2nd ed., 1980), pp. 3-10. Dis-
cussion with Michel Foucault. I      Interview. Liberation. October 23, 1980, pp. 16-17. I     
Interview. Liberation. October 3, 1983, pp. 30-31. I      Interview. Le Monde. October 6, 
1983, pp. 1,17. I      Interview. L'autrejournal, no. 8 (October 1985), pp. 12-22.

 

I   Interview. Liberation. September 2, 1986, pp. 27-28 and September 3, 1986, p. 38. P 
"Introduction a 'La Bete humaine' de Balzac." In Oeuvres Completes d'Emile Zola. Paris: 
Cercle du Livre Precieux, 1967. Vol. 6, pp. 13-21. Modified and reprinted under the title "Zola 
et la felure" as an appendix to Logigue du sens. P  Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, 
Legaisavoir. Les fragments posthumes (1881-82). Trans. Pierre Klossowski. Vol. 5 ofOeuvres 
philosophiques completes. 
Paris: Gallimard, 1967, pp. i-iv. With Michel Foucault. P   
Introduction to Johann Malfatti von Monteregio, Etudes sur la mathese, ou anarchie et 
hierarchie de la science. 
Paris: Ed. du Griffon d'Or, 1946, pp. ix-xxiv. "Klossowski et le 
corps-langage." Critique, no. 214 (March 1965), pp. 199-219. Modified and

 

reprinted as an appendix to Logique du sens. "Lettre a Michel Cressole," in Michel 

Cressole, Deleuze. Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1973,

 

pp. 107-118. Translated as "I Have Nothing to Admit." "Lucrece et le naturalisme." 
Etudes philosophiques, series 16, no. 1 (Jan.-March 1961), pp. 19-29. Modified and 
reprinted under the title "Lucrece et le simulacre" as an appendix to Logique du sens. 
"Lucrece et le simulacre." See "Lucrece et le naturalisme." "Methode de dramatisation." 
Bulletin de la Soci'ete Francaise de Philosophie, vol. 61, no. 3

 

(July-September 1967), pp. 89-118. Presentation followed by discussion. 

"Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui." See "Une theorie d'Autrui." 
"Mystere d'Ariane." Etudes nietzscheennes (1963).

 

"Nous croyons au caractere constructiviste de certaines agitations de gauche." Recherches, 
Les Untorelli, 
no. 30 (November 1977), pp. 149-150. Statement on repression in Italy written 
by Deleuze and signed by a number of French Intellectuals, September 20, 1977. "Un 
nouvel archiviste." Critique, no. 274 (March 1970), pp. 195-209. Review of Michel

 

Foucault, L 'archeologie du savoir. Modified and reprinted in Foucault, pp. 11-30. "Pensee 
nomade." In Nietzscheaujourd'hui?Vol. 
1. Paris: 10/18, 1973, pp. 159-190. Presentation by 
Deleuze to the Colloque de Cerisy (1972), with discussion. "Philosophie et minorite." 
Critique, no. 369 (February 1978), pp. 154-155. "La photographie est deja tiree dans les 
choses," Cahiers du Cinema, no. 352 (October 1983),

 

pp. 35-40. Interview with Pascal Bonitzer and Jean Narboni. "Platon et le simulacre." See 

"Renverser le platonisme." P   Preface to Antonio Negri, L 'anomalie sauvage. Puissance et 
pouvoir chez Spinoza. 
Paris: PUF,

 

1981, pp. 9-12. P    Preface to Guy Hocquenghem. L'apres-mai desfaunes. Paris: Grasset, 
1974, pp. 7-17. P    "Qu'est-ce que c'est, tes 'machines desirantes' a toi?" Les Temps 
Modernes, 
no. 316 (November 1972), pp. 854-856. Introduction to Pierre Benichou, "Saint 
Jackie, Comedienne et Bourreau." "A quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme?" In La 
philosophie. 
Ed. Francois Chatelet. Paris: Hachette, 1979. Vol. 4, pp. 293-339. (Abridged 
version of Histoire de la philosophie. 8 volumes. Paris: Hachette, 1972-1973.) "Renverser le 
platonisme (les simulacres)," RevuedeM'etaphysique et de Morale, vol. 71, no. 4

 

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584 □ BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

(October-December 1967), pp. 426-438. Modified and reprinted under the title "Platon et 
le simulacre" as an appendix to Logique du sens.

 

"De Sacher Masoch au masochisme." Arguments, vol. 5, no. 21 (Jan.-April 1961), pp. 40-46. P     
"Schizologie." Preface to Louis Wolfson, Le schizo et les langues. Paris: Gallimard, 1970, pp. 
5-23.

 

"Le schizophrene et le mot." Critique, no. 255/256 (August-September 1968), pp. 731-746. 

Modified and reprinted in Logique du sens, series 2 and 13.

 

"Schizophrenic et societe" in Encyclopaedia Universalis (1985), vol. 16, pp. 524-527.

 

"Sens et valeurs." Arguments, vol. 3, no. 15 (Sept.-Dec. 1959), pp. 20-28. Modified and 
reprinted in Chapter 1 of Nietzsche et la philosophie.

 

"Spinoza et la methode generate de M. Gueroult." Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vol. 

74, no. 2 (April-June 1970), pp. 426-437.

 

"Spinoza et nous." Revue de Synthese, 3rd series, nos. 89-91 (January-September 1978). 

Reprinted as Chapter 6 of Spinoza. Philosophie pratique, 2nd ed.

 

"Une theorie d'Autrui. Michel Tournier." Critique, no. 241 (June 1967), pp. 503-525. Modified 
and reprinted under the title "Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui" as an appendix to 
Logique du sens. Reprinted as the postface to Tournier, Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique. 
Paris: Gallimard, 1972. P "Trois problemes de groupe." Preface to Felix Guattari, Psychanalyse 
et transversalite. 
Paris: Maspero, 1972, pp. i-xi.

 

"Unite de 'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.'" Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vol. 68, no. 

4 (Oct.-Dec. 1963), pp. 427-442.

 

"Sur la volonte de puissance et l'eternel retour." In Nietzsche. Cahiers de Royaumont. Paris: 

Minuit, 1967, pp. 275-287.

 

"Zola et la felure." See "Introduction a 'la Bete humaine' de Balzac."

 

by Felix Guattari

 

English

 

Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. New York: Penguin, 

1984. A selection of essays from Psychanalyse et transversalite and the two versions of La 
revolution mol'eculaire, 
with a previously unpublished essay, "Capitalistic Systems, 

Structures and Processes" (with Eric Alliez), later published in French in Guattari, Les 
ann'ees d'hiver.

 

"Becoming-Woman." Trans. Rachel McComas and Stamos Metzidakis. Semiotext(e), 

Polysexuality, vol. 4, no. 1 (1981), pp. 86-88. Also translated as "Becoming a Woman" by 

Rosemary Sheed in Guattari, Molecular Revolution, pp. 233-235. Translation of "Devenir 

femme," La revolution mol'eculaire (both editions).

 

"Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist." Trans. Suzanne Fletcher. Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, vol. 

2, no. 3(1977), pp. 87-98.

 

"Freudo-Marxism." Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, vol. 2, no. 3(1977), pp. 73-75. Intended for 

Le Nouvel Observateur but never published in French.

 

"Genet Regained." Trans. Brian Massumi. LAICA Journal, vol. 5, no. 47 (Spring 1987). I       

Interview with Felix Guattari by Mark Seem. Diacritics, vol. 4, no. 3 (Fall 1974), pp. 38-41.

 

"Like an Echo of a Collective Melancholy." Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Semiotext(e), The Ger-
man Issue, 
vol. 4, no. 2 (1982), pp. 102-110. Translation of "Comme un echo de la 

melancholie collective," in La revolution mol'eculaire (10/18 edition). I    "The New Alliance." 

Interview with Sylvere Lotringer. Impulse, vol. 10, no. 2 (Winter 1982), pp. 41-44.

 

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BIBLIOGRAPHY □ 585

 

"The Proliferation of Margins." Trans. Richard Gardner and Sybil Walker. Semiotext(e), 

Italy: Autonomia, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980), pp. 108-111.

 

"Psychoanalysis and Politics." Trans. Paul Foss. Language, Sexuality and Subversion. Ed. 

Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris. Sydney: Feral Publications, 1978, pp. 125-133. Transla-

tion of "Psychanalyse et politique," first published in Politique et psychanalyse. Revised 

and published in La revolution moieculaire under the title "Les luttes du desir et la 

psychanalyse"; translated in The Molecular Revolution as "Psychoanalysis and the Strug-

gles of Desire."

 

"Psycho-Analysis and Schizo-Analysis." Trans. Janis Forman. Semiotext(e), Anti-Oedipus, vol. 

2, no. 3 (1977), pp. 77-85. Extracts from an interview about Anti-Oedipus  with Arno 

Munster originally published in the Frankfurter Rundschau (January 17,1973). Other por-

tions of this interview were published as "La fin de fetichismes," La revolution moieculaire.

 

Response to questionnaire on the city. Trans. Bruce Benderson. Zone, no. 112 (198 5), p. 460. I     

"Why Italy?" Trans. John Johnston. Semiotext(e), Italy: Autonomia, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980), pp. 

234-237. Interview, unpublished in French.

 

French

 

Les ann'ees d'hiver. Paris: Barrault, 1986. Collected essays 1980-1985.

 

L'inconscient moieculaire. Essais deSchizo-analyse. Paris: Recherches, 1979.

 

Les nouveaux espaces de liberie. With Toni Negri. Followed by Guattari, "Des libertes en

 

Europe," and Negri, "Lutte archeoligique." Paris: Dominique Bedou, 1985. 

Psychanalyse et transversalite. Preface by Gilles Deleuze ("Trois problemes de groupe").

 

Paris: Maspero, 1972. Collected essays 1965-1970. La revolution moieculaire. 

Fontenay-sous-Bois: Recherches, 1977. Essays 1971-1977. La

 

revolution moieculaire. Paris: Union Generate d'Editions (10/18), 1980. Essays 1972-1979. 

NOTE: The two collections entitled La revolution moieculaire are substantially different. The

 

Recherches edition includes a section on cinema and extensive selections on semiotics

 

that do not appear in the 10/18 version; the 10/18 version deals extensively with the Italian

 

Autonomia movement. I   Interview. L'Autre Journal, 

no. 5 (May 1985), pp. 6-22.

 

"Masses et minorites a la recherche d'une nouvelle strategie." Recherches, Les Untorelli, no.

 

30 (November 1977), pp. 113-122. "Semiologies signifiantes et semiologies 

asignifiantes," in Psychanalyse et semiotique. Actes

 

du Colloque de Milan, 1974. Ed. Armando Verdiglione. Paris: 10/18, 1975, pp. 151-163.

 

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Index

 

Compiled by Hassan Melehy

 

Adam, Paul: 572 n. 9

 

Aesthetics: and smooth and striated space,

 

492-99. See also Art; Epistemology 

Affect: and becoming-animal, 258-59; and

 

body, 260-61; definition of, xvi; and

 

haeccity, 261-62; and war machine, 400.

 

See also Spinoza, Baruch Afrikaans: as 

major language, 102 Agriculture: West as, 

18 Aguirre, the Wrath of God: 126 A la 
recherche du temps perdu: 
271-72, 289,

 

319 Alembert's equation: 335 Alliez, 

Eric: 568 n. 36 Alphandery, Paul: 520 n. 

23, 557-58 n. 59 Althusser, Louis: 130, 536 

n. 6 Amado, Jorge: 553 n. 13 Amalrik, 

Andrei: 470 America: as flow, 20; as 

rhizome, 19 Amin, Samir: 566 n. 23, 570 

n. 53; and

 

capitalist axiomatic, 465, 469; and social

 

formation, 435-36 Analogy: and 

representational thinking,

 

xi-xii; and resemblance, 236-37. See also

 

Representation "And": and linguistic 

variation, 99; vs. "to

 

be," 25, 98 Anti-Oedipus: xi, 3, 566 

n. 22 Aphorism: as plateau, 23 

Arborescent schema: and becoming,

 

293-94; critique of, xii-xiii; of evolution,

 

10-11; as hierarchy, 16-17; of language,

 

92-95; and line and point, 293-94; and

 

rhizome, 6-7, 20, 34, 328-29, 506; and

 

segmentarity, 211-12; and territorial

 

assemblage, 327-28; of thought, 15-17;

 

and tracing, 15, 20; and writing, 5-7. See

 

also Rhizome; State apparatus;

 

Stratification Archimedes: and nomad 

science, 361-63 Architecture: and 

consistency, 329; and

 

State science, 364-65. See also

 

Geometry; Science Ardant, Gabriel: 568 

n. 35 Ardant, Will: 568 n. 35 Aristotle: and 

war machine, 417 Arithmetic: see 

Mathematics Arland, Marcel: 195 Aron, 

Raymond: 563 nn. 104, 107 Arrow, 

Kenneth: 519 n. 14, 544 n. 80 Art: and 

becoming, 316-17; and nomad,

 

401-2; salvation through, 185-87; and

 

smooth and striated space, 492-99; and

 

territory, 320-21 Artaud: 542 n. 48; 

and body without

 

organs, 150, 158-59, 160, 162-63; and

 

drugs, 285; and nomad thought, xiii; and

 

thought, 377-78 Artisan: and flow of 

matter, 409; and

 

metallurgy, 411-12 Artist: and 

population, 345-46. See also Art Asimov, 

Isaac: 540 n. 23 Assemblage: and 

becoming, 306; and

 

becoming-animal, 242, 257-60; and body

 

without organs, 156, 157-58; book as, 4;

 

collective, of enunciation, 80, 85, 88; and

 

consistency, 331-34; and content and

 

expression, 88-89, 504-5; and

 

589

 

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590 □ INDEX

 

deterritorialization, 333-34, 504-5; of 

enunciation, 83, 87; and exchange, 

437-41; and faciality, 180-81; and form 

and matter, 340; and haeccity, 262-63; 

and incorporeal transformation, 82; and 

language, 109-10; libidinal, 37; and 

linguistic variation, 99-100; and 

machine, 343-44, 510-14; molecular, 

213; and multiplicity, 8, 22-23, 34; and 

order-word, 108-10; and refrain, 312, 

323-27; and regime of signs, 119, 121-22, 

140-41; and State apparatus, 513; and 

stratification, 503-5; and subject, 

264-65; and subjedification, 130, 134; 

territorial, 323-27, 332-34, 503-5; and 

unconscious, 35; and war machine, 

398-403, 406-7, 513. See also Machine; 

Machinic assemblage; Multiplicity; 

Plane of consistency

 

Atomic bomb: and war machine, 404-5. 

See also Weapon

 

Attila: and war machine, 417

 

Aurevilly, Barbey d': 193-94

 

Austin, J. L.: 77

 

Autran, Charles: 530 n. 22

 

Axiomatic: capitalist, 454-73 passim; and 

diagrammatic, 143-44; and State 

apparatus, 460-73 passim; and 

stratification, 57. See also Capitalism; 

State apparatus

 

Bach, Johann Sebastian: 511

 

Bachelard,Gaston:236,238,313,555n.32

 

Badiou, Alain: 537 n. 20

 

Baer, Karl Ernst von: 46-47, 53, 254

 

Baillon, M. H.: 520 n. 20

 

Bailly, Jean-Christophe: 521 n. 25

 

Bakhtin, Mikhail: 82, 523 n. 5, 524 n. 10,

 

525 n. 21 Balandier, Georges: 535 n. 4 

Balazs, Etienne: 565 n. 15 Balibar, 

Etienne: 569 n. 48 Balmes, Francois: 537 

n. 20 Balzac, Honore de: 266 Bamberger, 

J.-R: 523 n. 5 Bantu dialects: 102 Barnes, 

Mary: 138 Barraque, Jean: 532 n. 3, 545 n. 

87, 550 n.

 

48, 551 n. 51 Barthes, Roland: 533 

n. 7, 545 n. 88

 

Bartok, Bela: 342; and refrain, 349-50

 

Basaglia, Franco: x

 

Bataille, Georges: 383

 

Bateson, Gregory: 543 n. 62; and intensity, 

158; and plateau, iv, 21-22

 

Battle: and war machine, 416-23. See also 

War

 

Beaufret, Jean: 529 n. 18

 

Beaujouan, Guy: 572 n. 10

 

Beckett, Samuel: 97-98, 199; and faciality, 

173; and territorial assemblage, 503

 

Becoming: and abstract machine, 252; and 

arborescence, 293-94; and assemblage, 

306; and causality, 283-84; and 

deterritorialization, 291-92, 306-7; and 

drugs, 282-86; and haeccity, 280; and 

heterogeneity, 10; of major and minor 

languages, 104-6; and majority and 

minority, 291-93; and man, 291-93; and 

memory, 291-98; molecular nature of, 

292-93; and music, 299-309; and plane 

of consistency, 251-52, 507; and 

pragmatics, 251; and refrain, 350; and 

rhizome, 238-39, 251, 294; and 

schizoanalysis, 251; and secret, 287-90; 

and sexuality, 275-79; and stratification, 

502-3; and structuralism, 237-38; and 

transformation, 250-51; and war 

machine, 277-78

 

Becoming-animal: and assemblage, 242-43, 

257-59; of child, 14; and faciality, 

115-16, 176, 187; and line, 245; and 

masochism, 155-56; and molecule, 

272-75; and multiplicity, 239-52 passim; 

and music, 304-5, 308-9; and plane of 

consistency, 258-59; and psychoanalysis, 

259-60; and resemblance, 233-35; and 

State apparatus, 242-43; and 

stratification, 53; and transformation, 

252-53; and war machine, 242-43, 

247-48, 396; and writing, 240

 

Beethoven, Ludwig van: 95, 270, 511; and 

refrain, 348

 

Being: and State philosophy, xii-xiii

 

Bellini, Vincenzo: 307

 

Bene, Carmelo: and linguistic variation, 98

 

Bennet, E. A.: 521 ch. 2 n. 3

 

Benveniste, Emile: xviii, 78, 82, 130, 541 

n.42, 554 n. 25

 

Benveniste, R. E.: 10

 

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INDEX □ 591

 

Berg, Alban: 339, 552 n. 61

 

Bergson, Henri: x, 237-39, 374, 483-84,

 

486, 573 n. 17 Berio, Luciano: 

96,342,545 n. 87,546 n. 91 Berlioz, Hector: 

342 Bernoulli: and State science, 363 

Bernstein, I. S.: 553 n. 14 Berthe, Louis: 

536 n. 9, 566 n. 18 Bettelheim, Bruno: 542 

n. 57, 543 n. 62 Bible, the: and book, 127; 

King James, 529

 

n. 16; numbers in, 118; and reality, 129;

 

and subjectification, 131. See also

 

Christ; Christianity; Religion Bifo, 

Franco Berardi: 572 n. 68 Binary 

relations: and arborescent schema,

 

5; and faciality, 176-80; and multiplicity,

 

5; and segmentarity, 210 Biochemistry: 

and stratification: 45-46,

 

49-50 Biology: and stratification, 46-48. 

See also

 

Science Bizet, Georges: 269; and refrain, 

350 Black English: 93-94, 102-5 Black 

hole: and assemblage, 333-34; and

 

consciousness, 133; and faciality, 167-91

 

passim; and line of flight, 224; and

 

refrain, 312; and segmentarity, 211; and

 

stratification, 40, 56; and

 

subjectification, 167-68. See also White

 

wall Black Panthers: and becoming, 291 

Blanche, Robert: 570 nn. 54, 60 Blanchot, 

Maurice: xiii, 265, 538 n. 29, 541

 

n. 43, 556 n. 44 Bloch, Jules: 562 

n. 99 Block: and becoming, 294, 299; 

and

 

content and expression, 299. See also

 

Flow; Line of flight "Blumfeld": 169 

Body: and affect, 256-57; and cartography,

 

260-61; and faciality, 115-16, 170-72,

 

176, 181; and haeccity, 260-61; and

 

language, 80, 86; and machinic

 

assemblage, 89, 90; and number, 391-92;

 

and order-word, 107-8; and

 

representation, 86; and State apparatus,

 

366-67. See also Faciality; Organ;

 

Organism Body without organs: 149-66 

passim; and

 

assemblage, 4, 157-58; and

 

becoming-animal, 156; and 

becoming-woman, 276-77; and 

deterritorialization, 156-57, 161; and 

faciality, 171-72; and God, 150, 158-59; 

and intensity, 153, 157-58, 161, 164-65; 

and line, 203; and map, 12, 163-64; and 

metallurgy, 411; and multiplicity, 30, 

154; and organism, 4, 30, 158-59; and 

plane of consistency, 72, 154-55, 158, 

159, 165-66, 270, 506-8; and plateau, 

158; and psychoanalysis, 151, 165; and 

schizoanalysis, 165; and signifiance, 

159-61; and smooth space, 479; and 

stratification, 56, 159-63; and 

subjectification, 134, 159-61; and 

unconscious, 30; and Wolf-Man, 31. See 
also 
Organ; Organism

 

Bolero: 271

 

Bolsheviks: 38, 88, 100, 139

 

Bonnard, Pierre: 175

 

Book: American and European, 19; and 

arborescent schema, 5-7; and 

assemblage, 22-23; classical, 5; 

composition of, 3-4; and 

deterritorialization, 3-4, 11, 126-27; 

modern, 5-6; and multiplicity, 9; and 

plateau, 22; and representation, 22-23; 

and rhizome, 11, 22-23; and signifiance, 

126-27; and tracing, 24; and world, 5-6, 

11. See also Writing

 

Borderline: and becoming, 245-46, 249-53. 

See also Line

 

Borges, Jorge Luis: 125, 241

 

Boulez, Pierre: 262, 267, 269, 296, 518 n. 

22, 519 n. 8, 527 n. 39, 541 n. 36, 548 n. 

14, 553-54 n. 20; and smooth and 

striated space, 477-78

 

Bouligand, Georges: 554 n. 21, 556 n. 40, 

570 n. 61

 

Boulte, Nicolas: 537 n. 20

 

Boulvert, Gerard: 569 n. 44

 

Bourdieu, Pierre: 524-25 n. 13

 

Bradbury, Ray: 541 n. 37, 570 n. 57

 

Brain: as population, 64; as rhizome, 

15-16. See also Consciousness; Thought

 

Braudel, Fernand: 434, 468, 558 n. 60, 

558-59 n. 64, 561 n. 79

 

Brehier, Emile: 525 n. 18

 

Brekle, Herbert: and linguistic competence, 

92

 

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592 □ INDEX

 

Brelet, Gisele: 547 n. 102, 551 n. 50; and

 

refrain, 349-50 Breytenbach, Breyten: 

527 n. 38 Broglie, Louis de: 143 Bronte, 

Charlotte: 261 Brossolet, Guy: 520 n. 15, 

563 n. 104, 564

 

n. Ill Brouwer, L. E. J.: 570 n. 61 

Brownian motion: and crowd, 30; as

 

fractal, 487; and multiplicity, 33. See also

 

Mathematics; Physics; Science Brunhoff, 

Suzanne de: 538 n. 27 Brunschvicg, Leon: 

554 n. 23 Brunswick, Ruth Mack: and 

Wolf-Man, 26,

 

31, 35. See also Freud, Sigmund;

 

Psychoanalysis 

Biichner, Georg: 25

 

Buddha: and rhizome, 20. See also Religion 

Bureaucracy: of East and West, 19-20; and

 

segmentarity, 210, 214; and

 

subjectification, 132; and tracing, 15. See

 

also State apparatus Burroughs, William 

S.: 6, 152, 531 n. 14,

 

532 n. 8 Butor, Michel: 

546 n. 89

 

Cage, John: 267, 269, 344, 545 n. 87 

Calame-Griaule, Genevieve: 539-40 n. 21 

Caldwell, Erskine: 520 n. 18 Calling of 
Saint Peter and Saint Andrew,

 

The: 185 Canetti, Elias: 33-34, 107-8, 

214, 525 n. 17 Canguilhem, Georges: 522 n. 

9, 539 n. 13 Cannibalism: and presignifying 

regime,

 

118 Capgras, Joseph: 119-20 Capitalism: 

axiomatic of, 454-73 passim; and 

deterritorialization, 453-56; and rhizome, 

20; and social formation, 436-37; and 

smooth and striated space, 490-92; and 

State apparatus, 434-35, 447-48, 452-59; 

and war, 421. See also Axiomatic; State 

apparatus Capture: and State apparatus, 

424-73

 

passim Cardascia, Guillaume: 568 n. 33 

Carnot, Nicolas: and State science, 363 

Carpenter, Edmund: 557 n. 56, 572 nn. 6-7,

 

574 n. 28 Carriere, Mathieu: 542 n. 

50, 553 n.l 1

 

Carroll, Lewis: 76, 437 Cartography: 

and body, 260-61; and

 

rhizome, 12-15. See also Map Castaneda, 

Carlos: 138-39, 227-28, 248-49,

 

282, 519 n. 7, 556 n. 38; and body

 

without organs, 161-62 Castle, The: 132 

Causality: and evolution, 431; and plane of

 

consistency, 283-84 Cellular 

chemistry: and double

 

articulation, 42; and stratification,

 

58-60. See also Science Center: and 

multiplicity, 17-18; and

 

segmentarity, 209-10; and stratification,

 

50-52. See also Circle Certeau, Michel 

de: 527 n. 36 Cezanne, Paul: 343, 347, 493 

Chabrier, Emmanuel: and refrain, 350 

Charles, Daniel: 542 n. 51, 545 n. 87 

Charriere, Georges: 561 n. 82, 575 n. 37 

Chasles, Michel: 554 n. 28 Chatelet, 

Francois: 461, 565-66 n. 16 Chatelet, 

Gilles: 574 n. 27 Chatrian, Alexandre: 246 

Chaunu, Pierre: 558 n. 60; and smooth

 

space, 479-80 Chauvin, Remy: 10, 

522 n. 15 Chekhov, Anton: 206 

Cheng, Francois: 280, 542 n. 45 

Chevalier, Louis: 558 n. 61 Childe, V. 

Gordon: 563 n. 101; and

 

metallurgy, 412, 415; and State

 

apparatus, 428-29,450-51 Chomsky, 

Noam: 524 n. 7, 530 n. 38; and

 

Black English, 102; and grammatical

 

tree, 5, 7, 12, 15,91,92, 101, 148; and

 

Labov, 93-94; and minor language, 103;

 

and regime of signs, 141 Chopin, 

Frederic: 271 Christ: 124, 301, 533 n. 7; 

and faciality,

 

176-79, 182, 184-85, 187, 189; and

 

incorporeal transformation, 81. See also

 

Bible, the; Christianity; Religion 

Christen, Yves: 518-19 n. 5 Christianity: 

semiotic of, 125; translation

 

of, 137. See also Christ; Religion 

Chromaticism: and linguistics, 95-100. See

 

also Music; Painting Chronochromie: 

320 Church: and becoming-animal, 

247-48;

 

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INDEX □ 593

 

and segmentarity, 218. See also

 

Christianity; Religion CIA: and war 

machine, 403 Ciguri: 160 Cinema I: 518 

n. 21 Cinema II: 518 n. 21 Circle: and 

segmentarity, 208-11; and sign,

 

117. See also Center; Geometry City: 

and smooth and striated space, 481.

 

See also Town Cixous, Helene: xii 

Clairvaux, Bernard de: 364 Classicism: 

and form and substance, 338 Clastres, 

Helene: 553 n. 15 Clastres, Pierre: 528 n. 

7, 557 n. 58; and

 

evolutionism, 429; and war machine,

 

357-59 Clausewitz, Karl von: 218, 559 n. 

68, 571

 

n, 64; and State apparatus, 355; and war,

 

419-21,467 Cleisthenes: and State 

apparatus, 211-12 Clement, Catherine: 

Deleuze's interview

 

with, 517 n. 2 Clement, Pierre: 562 n. 

98 Clerambault, Gatian: 119-20, 128 

Cline, W. B.: 562 n. 98 Coding: and 

articulation, 41; and faciality,

 

170; and music, 11-12; and rhythm,

 

313-14; and segmentarity, 222-24; and

 

State apparatus, 427-28, 434, 448-51,

 

459-60; and stratification, 40, 52-55; and

 

substance, 41; and territory, 322; and

 

tools, 60-61; and translation, 52-53. See

 

also Language; Signifiance Cogito: and 

subjectivity, 128, 130-32. See

 

also Self (Mot) Communication: and 

language, 75-79, 85.

 

See also Information; Information

 

science Compars: and royal science, 

369-70. See

 

also Dispars Composition: see 

Consistency Computer science: and 

arborescent

 

schema, 16. See also Information

 

science; Science; Technology Concept: 

and identity, xi; line as, 22; and

 

State philosophy, xii-xiii. See also

 

Epistemology; Idea; Thought 

Consciousness: and subjectification,

 

131-32, 134. See also Epistemology;

 

Subjectivity; Thought Consistency: and 

assemblage, 327-28,

 

331-34; and deterritorialization, 336-37;

 

and expression, 329-33; and

 

heterogeneity, 328-31; and music, 343;

 

and plateau, xiv; and State apparatus,

 

431-32, 434-35; and stratification,

 

335-37. See also Assemblage;

 

Heterogeneity;-Multiplicity; Plane of

 

consistency; Stratification Constant: 

linguistic, 92, 93-94; and minor

 

language, 101-10. See also Linguistics;

 

Variation Content: and abstract machine, 

511-12;

 

and articulation, 44, 64; and assemblage,

 

88-89, 504-5; and block, 299; and

 

deterritorialization, 87-89, 108-10, 307;

 

and diagrammatic, 142-45; and

 

expression, 44-45, 111; and form, 43-44;

 

and language, 85-91; molecular nature

 

of, 57-58; and nomad science, 369; and

 

sign, 117; and stratification, 43, 57,

 

60-73 passim, 502-3; and variation, 94.

 

See also Expression, Form; Linguistics;

 

Matter; Substance Cooper, David: 525 

n. 16 Coriat, Benjamin: 571 n. 66 

Cosmos: and deterritorialization, 326-27,

 

337; and modernity, 342-43 Cotard, 

Jules: 531 n. 2 Courtship: and territory, 

324-25. See also

 

Love; Sexuality Cousteau, 

Jacques: 549 n. 26 "Crack-up, 

The": 198-200 Cricket on the 
Hearth, The: 
175 Cromwell, 

Oliver: 125 Crowd: and 

multiplicity, 30; and

 

romanticism, 341 Crusades, the: and 

assemblage, 89; and

 

flow, 220-21; and history, 23-24; and war

 

machine, 383-84. See also Christianity;

 

Religion Crystallization: and 

stratification, 49-50;

 

57-60 Cuenot, Lucien: 548 n. 21 

Cummings, E. E.: and linguistic variation,

 

99 Cuvier, Georges: 46-47, 53, 

254

 

Daisy Miller: 290

 

background image

594 □ INDEX

 

Dalcq, Albert: 531-32 n. 7

 

Dali, Salvador: 27

 

Darien, Georges: 523 n. 2

 

Darius: 122

 

Darwin, Charles: 46-49, 234. See also 

Evolution

 

Daudin, Henri: 538 n. 1

 

Debussy, Claude: 270-71, 299, 319, 341-43, 

545 n. 87; and becoming, 308; and 

faciality, 169; and refrain, 303, 347

 

Decalcomania: and rhizome, 12-15. See 

also Map; Tracing

 

Decoding: see Coding

 

Deconstruction: and feminism, xii

 

Delage, Roger: 551-52 n. 59

 

Deleuze, Gilles: ix-x; and Guattari, xi-xv

 

Deligny, Fernand: 14, 202-3, 547 n. 1

 

Democritus: 361; and smooth space, 

363-64, 489; and State science, 363. See 
also 
Lucretius; Molecule

 

De Niro, Robert: and becoming-animal, 

274

 

Derrida, Jacques: xi, 555 n. 32; and war 

machine, 417

 

Desargues, Gerard: 363, 365

 

Descartes, Rene: 128, 530 n. 32

 

Desire: and assemblage, 399-400; and body 

without organs, 154-55, 165; and 

psychoanalysis, 13; and segmentarity, 

215. See also Libido; Love; Sexuality

 

Despot: as flow, 19-20; and signifying 

regime, 116-17. See also State apparatus

 

Dessert, Daniel: 555 n. 30

 

Detective novel: as literary genre, 192-93

 

Deterritorialization: and abstract machine, 

142-45; and assemblage, 333-34, 504-5; 

and becoming, 291-92, 306-7; and body 

without organs, 156-57, 161; and book, 

126; and capitalism, 453-56; and 

consistency, 336-37; and content and 

expression, 87-89, 108-10, 307; and 

faciality, 172, 174-91 passim; and flow, 

219-21, 226; and language, 61-63; and 

line, 203-5; and line of flight, 510; and 

map tracing, 15; and multiplicity, 9, 32, 

33; and music, 301-3; and nomads, 

381-84; and novella, 195-200; and plane 

of consistency, 70-71, 270, 272; and 

population, 123-25, 345-46; and refrain, 

300-302, 347-48; and regime of signs,

 

141-43, 508; and rhizome, 9-10, 21; and

 

science, 372; and segmentarity, 222-24;

 

and semiotic, 135, 138-39; and sign,

 

67-68, 112, 113, 115-17, 121-23; and

 

State apparatus, 432-34; and

 

stratification, 53-57; and

 

subjectification, 133; and substance, 41;

 

and variation, 99-100; and war machine,

 

353. See also Line of flight; Nomads;

 

Territory Detienne, Marcel: 399, 426, 

556 n. 41, 560

 

n. 78 Devaux, Emile: 522-23 n. 24, 533 

n. 6 Devil, the: and becoming-animal, 239,

 

252-53 Dhorme, Edouard: 

529 n. 12 Diaboliques: 194

 

Diagrammatic: 141 -48. See also Axiomatic 

Dialect: and major language, 101-3 
Dialogues: 517 Dickens, Charles: 175 

Dieterlen, Germaine: 563 n. 102 
Difference et repetition: x, 517 n. 4 Dillard, 

J. L: 527 n. 39 Dimension: and becoming, 

251-52; of

 

multiplicity, 8-9. See also Geometry;

 

Space Discourse: direct, 84; indirect, 

76-77, 80,

 

84, 99-100. See also Language;

 

Linguistics Dislocation, La: I'i-l^ 

Dispars: and nomad science, 370-71. See

 

also Compars DNA: and evolution, 10 

Dobb, Maurice: 537 n. 19, 569 n. 49 

Domination: and language, 101, 105-6 

Dos Passos, John: 520 n. 18 Dostoyevsky, 

Fyodor: 196, 257, 530 n. 29 Double 

articulation: and diagrammatic,

 

142-43; and stratification, 40-74 passim,

 

502-3. See also Content; Expression 

Doyle, Arthur Conan: 40 Dream: and 

multiplicity, 30; and

 

representation, 29-30. See also

 

Unconscious Dreiser, Theodore: 520 n. 

18 Dreissche, T. van den: 549 n. 29 Drugs: 

and perception, 282-86 Dualism: and 

becoming, 276-77; and map

 

tracing, 13-14; and multiplicity, 20. See

 

background image

INDEX □ 595

 

also Double articulation

 

Duby, Georges: 537 n. 19

 

Duccio: 185

 

Ducrot, Oswald: 77, 78, 80

 

Duhem, Pierre: 540 n. 29

 

Dumas, Alexandre: 250

 

Dumezil, Georges: 556 nn. 41, 43, 559 n. 

67, 564 n. 8,565 n. 10; and 

becoming-animal, 242-43; and State 

apparatus, 351-52, 371, 424-26; and war 

machine, 354

 

Duns Scotus, John: 540-41 n. 33

 

Dupouy, Roger: 532 n. 11, 540 n. 32

 

Dupreel, Eugene: and consistency, 328-29

 

Durkheim, Emile: 218-19, 376

 

Duvignaud, Jean: 237

 

Earth: and deterritorialization, 40; and

 

romanticism, 338-42. See also

 

Deterritorialization; Territory Ecce 

Homo: 269 Ecumenon: and stratification, 

50, 52, 55,

 

56, 72-73. See also Planomenon 

Ego: Freudian, xviii. See also

 

Psychoanalysis; Self (Moi); Subjectivity 

Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenaus: 547 n. 7, 548-49 n.

 

25, 550n.38 Eichendorff, Joseph: 550 n. 

47 Einstein, Albert: 484, 501, 511 

Eisenstein, Sergei: 413-14, 533 n. 10, 550

 

n. 48; and faciality, 184 Eliade, Mircea: 

548 n. 18, 564 n. 2 Eliot, T. S.: 520 n. 18 

Emmanuel, Arghiri: 568 n. 36, 569 n. 49 

Emperaire, Jose: 557 n. 54 Engels, 

Friedrich: 427, 566 n. 25, 568-69 n.

 

41 English: as major language, 102 

Enunciation: and assemblage, 7, 22, 37;

 

and incorporeal transformation, 82-83;

 

and nomadology, 23; and order-word,

 

107; social character of, 79-80; subject

 

of, 129. See also Linguistics; Statement 

Epistemology: and war machine, 361-74

 

passim. See also Concept; Idea;

 

Subjedification; Subjectivity; Thought 

Erckmann, Emile: 246 Ernst, Max: and 

faciality, 182 Esquirol, Jean: 119-20 
Ethics: 153,257

 

Ethnology: and State apparatus, 429-30

 

Ethology: and consistency, 336

 

Euclid: and State science, 109, 364; and 

striated space, 371, 489

 

Euclidean space: and multiplicity, 485-86; 

and stratification, 47. See also 

Geometry; Space

 

Evans-Pritchard, E. E.: 535 n. 3

 

Evolution: and becoming, 238-39; and 

heterogeneity, 10-11; and representation, 

10; and State apparatus, 429-31; and 

stratification, 47-49

 

Exchange: and assemblage, 437-41; and 

territory, 440. See also Capitalism

 

Experimentation: and body without 

organs, 149-51, 161-62, 164; and 

interpretation, 162

 

Expression: and abstract machine, 511-12; 

and articulation, 44, 64; and assemblage, 

88-89, 504-5; and block, 299; and 

consistency, 329-33; and content, 43-45; 

and deterritorialization, 87-89, 108-10, 

307; and diagrammatic, 142-45; and 

faciality, 179-80; and language, 85-91; 

molar nature of, 57-58; and nomad 

science, 369; and order-word, 108-9; and 

regime of signs, 111,140-41; and sign, 

117; and stratification, 43, 57, 60-73 
passim, 502-3; and territory, 317-18; and 

variation, 94. See also Content; Double 

articulation; Form

 

Exteriority: and assemblage, 23; and 

multiplicity, 9; and nomad thought, 

xii-xii, 377; and stratification, 49-52, 

57-58; and territory, 317-18; and war 

machine, 24, 351-80 passim. See also 

Interiority

 

Fabric: and smooth and striated space, 

475-77

 

Faciality: and abstract machine, 168-70, 

174-91 passim: and assemblage, 180-81; 

and becoming, 292-93; and 

becoming-animal, 176, 187; and body 

without organs, 171-72; and Christ, 

176-79, 182, 184-85, 187, 189; and 

coding, 170; and deterritorialization, 

61-62, 172, 174-91; and expression, 

179-80; and language, 60-62; and line of 

flight, 188; and multiplicity, 182-83; and

 

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596 □ INDEX

 

refrain, 301; and rhizome, 190-91; and 

schizoanalysis, 188;andsemiotic, 

180-82; and sign, 117; and signifiance, 

115-16, 179-82; and subjectification, 

179-82. See also Body

 

Farachi, Armand: 23

 

Fascism: and capitalist axiomatic, 462-63; 

and segmentarity, 214-15; and State 

apparatus, 230-31; as suicidal State, 231. 
See also State apparatus; Totalitarianism

 

Faulkner, William: 261, 292, 520 n. 18, 572 

n.2

 

Faure, Elie: 413

 

Faye, Jean-Pierre: 82, 139, 536 n.l 1, 

570-71 n. 62

 

Feminism: and deconstruction, xii; and 

psychoanalysis, xi

 

Ferenczi, Sandor: and becoming-animal, 

259

 

Fernandez, Dominique: 303-4, 307

 

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: and State 

philosophy, xii

 

Fiedler, Leslie: 282-83, 520 n. 18

 

Film: and becoming-animal, 233; and 

faciality, 168, 172, 175, 184; and 

movement, 281

 

Fitzgerald, F. Scott: 194, 198-200, 206, 

229, 520 n. 18; and becoming, 248, 260, 

279; and smooth space, 482

 

Flaubert, Gustave: 541 n. 39

 

Fleutiaux, Pierrette: 200-202

 

Flore, Joachim de: 530 n. 23

 

Flow: and book, 3-4; and capitalist 

axiomatic, 468-69; and 

deterritorialization, 11; and matter, 

409-10; and nomads, 363, 404-15 
passim; and segmentarity, 217-21, 

225-26; and State apparatus, 448-49, 

452-53, 456, 459-60. See also Line of 

flight; Rhizome

 

Foch, Ferdinand: and war, 416

 

Focus: 291-92

 

Forbes, Robert James: 563 n. 103

 

Form: and abstract machine, 511; and 

articulation, 41; and becoming-animal, 

252-53; and classicism, 338; and content 

and expression, 89; and intensity, 253; 

and language, 85-86; and matter, 407-9; 

of State, 448-60 passim; and 

stratification, 43, 51-52, 54, 59-60, 60-73

 

passim; and variation, 95. See also

 

Content; Matter Fort-Da: and refrain, 

299. See also Freud,

 

Sigmund; Psychoanalysis Fortes, Meyer: 

535 n. 3, 536 n. 9 Foucault, Michel: xi, 

xviii, 517 n. 8, 518 n.

 

20, 528 n. 5, 530-31 n. 39, 536-37 n. 16,

 

538 n. 1, 556 n. 44; and language, 66-67;

 

and nomad thought, xiii; and

 

order-word, 87; and power, xvii, 224; and

 

regime of signs, 140 Fourquet, Francois: 

566 n. 16 Fractal: and multiplicity, 486-88. 
See also

 

Mathematics; Number Fradin, Jacques: 

566 n. 25 Francis, Saint: 178 Francis 
Bacon: 
518 n. 21 Francois I: 221-22 

"Franglais": 102 Freud, Sigmund: 5, 14, 

18, 29-30, 125,127,

 

241, 284, 519 n. 9, 541 n. 41, 544 n. 78;

 

and becoming-animal, 259; and body

 

without organs, 164; and multiplicity, 31;

 

and Wolf-Man, 26-38 passim. See also

 

Psychoanalysis Fried, Michael: 546 

n. 89, 575 n. 38 Friendship theorem: 

17 Fuller, J. F. C: 560

 

Gaelic: as minor language, 102

 

Galbraith, John Kenneth: 461, 524 n. 12

 

Galileo: 511

 

Galois, Evariste: 142

 

Game theory: and State apparatus, 352-53

 

Gardiner, Alan Henderson: 541 n. 40

 

Gaulle, Charles de: and May 1968, 216;

 

and State apparatus, 424-25 Gautier, 

Emile Felix: 537 n. 23, 557 n. 57 Gavi, 

Philippe: 274 Gay rights movement: and 

psychoanalysis,

 

xi Genesis, Book of: 87. See also Bible, 

the Genetics: and stratification, 53; and

 

language, 62-63 Genghis Khan: 226; and 

war machine, 354,

 

392-93,417-19 Genseric: 226 Geoffrey 

Saint-Hilaire, Etienne: 45-48, 55,

 

254-55, 542 n. 52 Geology: 

and stratification, 40

 

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INDEX □ 597

 

Geometry: and nomad science, 367; and 

State apparatus, 212, 362-65. See also 

Mathematics; Number; Space

 

Geroudet, Paul: 548 n. 22

 

Giotto: 178

 

Girard, Claude: 544 n. 78

 

Giscard d'Estaing, Valery: 216, 468

 

Glass, Philip: 542 n. 46

 

Glossalalie (Speaking in tongues): 96

 

Gluckman, Max: 558 n. 61

 

God: and body without organs, 150, 

158-59; and book, 127; as cause, 3; in 

East and West, 18; and prophetism, 

123-24; and stratification, 40, 43-44, 58; 

and subjectification, 128, 130. See also 

Religion

 

Godard, Jean-Luc: 25, 97-98, 267; and 

faciality, 172

 

Godelier, Maurice: 530 n. 33

 

Goethe, Johann von: 269, 540 n. 22, 542 n. 

52; and Kleist, 268-69, 356; and smooth 

and striated space, 482; and State 

apparatus, 378; and war machine, 24

 

Golea, Antoine: 548 n. 11

 

Gordon, Pierre: 539 n. 21

 

Gorz, Andre: 215-16

 

Gould, Glenn: 8

 

Grammar: and language instruction, 75-76. 

See also Language; Linguistics

 

Grammaticality: and homogeneity, 93-94; 

and power, 101; and variation, 99

 

Gravity: and striated space, 370

 

Greimas, A. J.: 528 n. 6

 

Griaule, Marcel: 415, 521 ch. 3 n. 2

 

Griaznov, Mikhail: 430, 560 n. 73

 

Griffith, D. W.: and faciality, 175, 183, 184

 

Grohman, Will: 546 n. 92

 

Grousset, Rene: 394, 563 n. 105, 574 n. 30, 

575 n. 37

 

Guattari, Felix: x-xi; and Deleuze, xi-xv

 

Guerin, Daniel: 214, 537 n. 24

 

Gueroult, Martial: 560 n. 77

 

Guerrero, Margarita: 539 n. 10

 

Guillaume, Gustave: 349, 541 n. 39

 

Guillerm, Alain: 571 n. 66

 

Guillerm, Daniele: 571 n. 66

 

Gulik, Robert van: 532 n. 14

 

Habermas, Jiirgen: 518 n. 18 Haeccity: and 

assemblage, 262-63; and

 

becoming, 276-77, 280; and individual, 

253; and linguistics, 263-65; and plane of 

consistency, 266-72, 507; and 

psychoanalysis, 264; and science, 369; 

and subjectivity, 261-65. See also 

Individual; Molecule

 

Haptic space: and nomad art, 492-99

 

Hardy, Thomas: 186-87, 332

 

Harmand, Jacques: 564 n. 8

 

Haudricourt, Andre: 18, 533 n. 12

 

Hegel, G. W E: 269, 556 n. 42; and 

Deleuze's philosophy, x; and Kleist, 268, 

356; and State, 385, 460

 

Heidegger, Martin: 125, 561 n. 85

 

Helioglobale: 158

 

Helmholtz, Hermann von: 573 n. 14

 

Herbert, Frank: 559-60 n. 70

 

Herzog, Werner: 110, 126

 

Hess, W. R.: 549 n. 29

 

Heterogeneity: and becoming, 250; and 

consistency, 328-31; of language, 

100-101; and nomad thought, xiii, 24, 

361; and rhizome, 7-8; of social 

formation, 435-37. See also Assemblage; 

Consistency; Multiplicity; Plane of 

consistency

 

Heusch, Luc de: 353, 528 n. 4, 543-44 n. 75

 

Heyting, A.: 570 n. 71

 

Hierarchy: and rhizome, 21

 

Hilbert, David: and diagrammatic, 143

 

Hincker, Francois: 569 n. 45

 

History: and memory, 295-96; natural, and 

evolutionism, 233-34; and nomads, 

23-24, 393-94; and segmentarity, 221-22; 

and State apparatus, 23

 

Hitchcock, Alfred: 305

 

Hitler, Adolf: 214, 231

 

Hjelmslev, Louis: 523 n. 28, 526 n. 22, 531 

n. 40; and content and expression, 108; 

and double articulation, 45, 402; and 

stratification, 43; and variation, 99

 

Hobbes, Thomas: and State apparatus, 357

 

Hocquenghem, Guy: 273

 

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von: and abstract 

machine, 512; and becoming-animal, 

240, 258, 275; and order-word, 110

 

Holderlin, Friedrich: 125, 268, 332, 507, 

550 n. 47

 

Hoist, E. von: 549 n. 29

 

Holstein, Jonathan: 572 n. 3

 

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598 □ INDEX

 

Homogeneity: of language, 92, 100-101;

 

and smooth and striated space, 488-89.

 

See also Consistency; Heterogeneity 

Horticulture: East as, 18-19 Hubac, 

Pierre: 382 Hugues-le-loup: 246 Human 

beings: and art, 320-21, 498-99;

 

and becoming-animal, 238, 252-53;

 

enslavement of, 456-57; and faciality,

 

170-71, 190-91; and music, 309. See also

 

Man Humboldt, Wilhelm von: and 

State

 

philosophy, xii Hume, David: as minor 

philosopher, x Hunt: and war, 395-96 

Husserl, Edmund: 192-93, 545 n. 85; and

 

geometry, 367; and formed matter,

 

407-8, 410; and multiplicity, 483 

Hylomorphic model: see Matter, and form 
Hyperion: 268

 

"I": and subjectification, 130. See also

 

Consciousness; Self (Moi); Subjectivity 

IBM: and war machine, 403 Ibn Khaldun, 

'Abd al-Rahman: 366, 481,

 

557 n. 51 Icon: and sign, 112; and 

stratification, 65.

 

See also Index; Linguistics; Symbol 

Idea: and resemblance, 235; and State

 

philosophy, xii; and war, 420. See also

 

Concept; Thought Identity: and State 

philosophy, xii-xiii; and

 

subject and object, xi; and word, 28 

Ideology: and assemblage, 4; and content

 

and expression, 68, 89-90 

Iliad: 426

 

Illusion: and abstract machine, 63, 65 

Immanence: and faith, 282; and line, 205;

 

and plane of consistency, 154, 266-67;

 

and pleasure, 156-57;and rhizome, 18,20 

Immelmann, K.: 548 n. 24 Incorporeal 

transformation: and language,

 

85; and order-word, 108-9. See also

 

Transformation Index: and sign, 112; 

and stratification, 65.

 

See also Icon; Linguistics; Symbol 

Individual: and form, 253, 254; and

 

haeccity, 261-62; and multiplicity, 254.

 

See also Haeccity Information: genetic, 

10-11; and language,

 

75-76, 78-79, 85; and signifiance, 79. See 
also 
Communication

 

Information science: 5, 16, 79, 179-80. See 

also Computer science

 

Intensity: and assemblage, 4; and body 

without organs, 31, 153, 157-58, 161, 

164-65; and form, 253; and language, 

109-10; and map, 15; and multiplicity, 

33; and plane of consistency, 70; and 

plateau, xiv, 22; and pleasure, 157. See 
also 
Consistency; Plane of consistency

 

Interiority: and pleasure, 156-57; and State 

philosophy, xii-xiii; and stratification, 

49-52; and territory, 317-18; of thought, 

377. See also Exteriority

 

Interpretation: and book, 127; and 

experimentation, 162; and faciality, 115; 

and signifiance, 114; and 

subjectification, 138

 

"In the Cage": 195-98

 

Irigaray, Luce: xii

 

Irish English: 102

 

Isakower, Otto: 169

 

Isomorphy: and capitalist axiomatic, 

464-66; and stratification, 46. See also 

Form

 

"Jackals and Arabs": 37

 

Jackson, George: 204

 

Jacob, Francois: 10-11, 42, 62, 522 n. 15

 

Jacobs, Jane: 440, 565 n. 11

 

Jakobson, Roman: 531 n. 41

 

James, Henry: 195-98, 290, 329, 520 n. 18

 

Janequin, Clement: 300

 

Jargy, Simon: 547 n. 3

 

Jaspers, Karl: 556 n. 46

 

Jaulin, Robert: 533 n. 12

 

Jevons, W. Stanley: 437

 

Jewish people: and becoming, 291-92; as

 

subject, 128, 130. See also Bible, the;

 

Moses Joan of Arc: 176; and 

becoming-woman, 277 Jones, LeRoi: 527 n. 

39, 530 n. 34. See also

 

Black English Joset, Paul Ernst: 539 n. 

11, 544 n. 77 Jouhandeau, Marcel: 530 n. 

28 Jouissance: and body without organs, 

154 Journet, Jean-Louis: 555 n. 30 Joyce, 

James: 6, 53, 105, 127, 200, 209 Judgment: 

and representational thinking,

 

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INDEX □ 599

 

xi-xii. See also Aesthetics Julia, 

Dominique: 527 n. 36 Julien, Florence: 

202 Jung, Carl: 30, 235-36, 238, 241, 259, 

411.

 

See also Freud, Sigmund; Psychoanalysis 

Junger, Ernst: 403, 518 n. 3, 564 n. 6

 

Kafka, Franz: xvii, 15, 36, 37, 76, 97-98, 

122, 225, 346, 520 n. 22, 529 n. 15,541 

n. 44, 545 n. 84, 552 n. 5; and abstract 

machine, 512; and assemblage, 88-89, 

505; and becoming-animal, 243-44; and 

bureaucracy, 4, 34, 214; and 

deterritorialization, 306; and faciality, 

169; and subjectification, 132; and 

variation, 94; and war machine, 24

 

Kandinsky, Vasili: 295, 298, 575 n. 38

 

Kant, Immanuel: x, 367, 376, 417

 

Kaufmann, Arnold: 551 n. 54

 

Kerouac, Jack: 19,280

 

Kesey, Ken: 520 n. 18

 

Keynesian economics: and capitalist 

axiomatic, 462

 

Kierkegaard, Suren: 197, 279, 281, 282, 

376, 537 n. 17

 

Kings of the Road: 482

 

Kipling, Rudyard: 31

 

Klaatsch, Hermann: 533 n. 6

 

Klee, Paul: 295, 298, 303, 304, 310, 312, 

337, 342, 344, 346, 347, 551 nn. 55, 58

 

Klein, Melanie: 13-14, 541 n. 41. See also 

Freud, Sigmund; Psychoanalysis

 

Kleist, Heinrich von: and haeccity, 268; 

and multiplicity, 9; and nomads, 378, 

381; and plane of consistency, 507; and 

rhizome, 25; and smooth and striated 

space, 482; and war machine, 4, 24, 

355-56, 400

 

Klossowski, Pierre: 131-32, 530 n. 28

 

Kojeve, Alexandre: 556 n. 42

 

Koran, the: and book, 127. See also 

Mohammed; Religion

 

Kraepelin, Emil: 119

 

Krishna: and body without organs, 151. See 

also Religion

 

Kristeva, Julia: 523 n. 27, 528 n. 8, 559-60 

n. 70

 

La Boetie, Etienne de: 359

 

Labor: and smooth and striated space,

 

490-92; surplus, as apparatus of capture, 

441-42. See also Capitalism; Capture; 

Marx, Karl

 

Laborit, Henri: 535 n. 13

 

Labov, William: 93-94, 103, 524 nn. 7, 10, 

526 n. 28

 

Lacan, Jacques: x, 26, 171, 529 n. 9, 543 n. 

71. See also Psychoanalysis

 

Lacarriere, Jacques: 539 n. 20, 566 n. 21

 

La Casiniere, Joelle de: 520 n. 21

 

Lagache, Daniel: 529 n. 9

 

Laing, R. D.: x

 

Lalonde, Michel: 527 n. 37

 

Lamarck, Chevalier de: 522 n. 8

 

Land: and refrain, 347-48. See also 

Territory

 

Landscape: and faciality, 172-73; and 

music, 319; and refrain, 301

 

Language: and abstract machine, 148; and 

deterritorialization, 61-63; and faciality, 

60-62; and genetics, 62-63; and haeccity, 

263-65; as heterogeneous reality, 

100-101; and incorporeal 

transformation, 82; and line, 202-3; 

major and minor, 7-8, 101-10; and map 

tracing, 77; and music, 95-97; philosophy 

of, 86; and plane of consistency, 91; and 

regime of signs, 140-41, 148; and speech, 

78, 92; and State apparatus, 82-83, 

429-30; and stratification, 60-70; and 

subjectivity, 78. See also Coding; 

Linguistics; Semiotic; Sign; Signifiance

 

Laplanche, Jean: 541 n. 41

 

Laroche, Emmanuel: 557 n. 51, 572 n. 12

 

Larouche, Jean Claude: 546 n. 98

 

Lautman, Albert: 485, 556 n. 39

 

Lautreamont, le Conte de: 236

 

Laviosa-Zambotti, Pia: 522 n. 14

 

Law: and science, 369-70. See also State 

apparatus

 

Lawrence, D. H.: 186-87, 188-89, 197, 205, 

244, 251-52, 276, 546 n. 90

 

Lawrence, T. E.: 563 n. 104

 

Leach, Edward: 246-47

 

League of Nations: and State apparatus, 435

 

Leaves of Grass: 19

 

Leclaire, Serge: and Wolf-Man, 26

 

Leeuw, Gerardus van der: 574 n. 29

 

Lelart, Michel: 536 n. 15

 

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600 □ INDEX

 

Lenin, V. I.: 83, 100, 563 n. 108

 

Lenz, Friedrich Walther: 25, 378

 

Leroi-Gourhan, Andre: 60, 64, 302, 395, 

407,475, 574 n. 33

 

Letter to Hitler: 163-64

 

Levi-Strauss, Claude: 112, 113, 209, 210, 

236-37, 433, 539 n. 11, 541 n. 40

 

Lewin.Kurt: 152-53, 169

 

Libidinal economy: of West, xiv

 

Libido: and body without organs, 37; and 

flow, 31; and machinic assemblage, 36; 

and multiplicity, 31; and unconscious, 

35. See also Desire; Psychoanalysis; 

Sexuality

 

Lied von der Erde, Das (The song of the 

earth): 339

 

Life of Saint Francis, The: 178

 

Ligers, Z: 539-40 n. 21

 

Limet, Henri: 561 n. 89

 

Lindon, Jerome: 529 n. 17

 

Lindqvist, N.: 527 n. 36

 

Line: and arborescent schema, 293-94; and 

becoming, 279-80; and 

becoming-animal, 245; and body without 

organs, 203; and deterritorialization, 

203-5; and diagrammatic, 144-45; and 

language, 202-3; and map, 202-3; and 

nomad art, 496-98; and novella, 

195-202; and rhizome, 8, 21, 203, 505-6; 

and schizoanalysis, 202-3; and 

segmentarity, 9, 202-7, 209, 211-12, 217, 

222-26; and smooth space, 478-79; and 

State apparatus, 204; and 

subjectification, 131-32. See also 

Geometry; Line of flight; Plane; Space

 

Lineage: and organization, 388, 391-92; 

and phylum, 406-7; State apparatus, 393

 

Line of flight: and assemblage, 88-89; and 

becoming, 277; and book, 3-4; and 

deterritorialization, 510; and faciality, 

188; and map tracing, 14-15; and 

multiplicity, 9, 32; and plane of 

consistency, 270; and point, 298; and 

rhizome, 9, 11,21; and signifying 

regime, 116, 121-22; and stratification, 

55; and subjectification, 133-34; and war 

machine, 422-23; and writing, 24-25. See 
also 
Deterritorialization; Line

 

Linguistics: 75-110 passim; and abstract 

machine, 511-12; and arborescent

 

schema, 5; and content and expression,

 

90-91; and incorporeal transformation,

 

82; and power, 7-8, 18; and pragmatics,

 

85, 90-91, 97-98; and rhizome, 6-7; as

 

science, 100-110. See also Coding;

 

Language; Semiotic; Sign; Signifiance 

Liszt, Franz: 319 Little Hans: 14, 256-59. 
See also Freud,

 

Sigmund Lizot, Jacques: 176, 209, 

535-36 n. 5 Logique du sens: x, 541 
Logos: and nomos, 369-73; and State

 

apparatus, xiii Lombard, Maurice: 558 n. 

60, 562 n. 97 Lorca, Federico: 261 Lorenz, 

Konrad: 34, 239, 315-16, 547 n.

 

46, 548 nn. 9, 12,17,23 Lory, G. M.: 527 

n. 38 Losey, Joseph: 291-92 Louis XIV: 

558 n. 59 Love: and body without organs, 

151; and

 

marginalism, 438-39; and

 

subjectification, 131-32, 134. See also

 

Desire; Sexuality Lovecraft, H. P.: 240, 

245, 248, 251, 523 n.

 

32 Lowie, Robert: 113 Lowry, 

Malcolm: 533 n. 8 Loyola, Ignacio 

de: 533 n. 7 Luca, Gherasim: 

97-98, 530 n. 32 Lucretius: x, 361, 

489-90. See also

 

Democritus; Molecule Ludendorff, 

Erich: 563 n. 108 Luke, Gospel according 

to: 124. See also

 

Bible, the 

Lulu: 184

 

Luther, Martin: 126 Luxemburg, Rosa: 

537 n. 20 Lyotard, Jean-Francois: 518 n. 

17,532 n. 14

 

Macciochi, Maria-Antonietta: 538 n. 32 

Machine: and assemblage, 4, 343-44, 

346-47; and capitalism, 456-59; and 

consistency, 330-31; and diagrammatic, 

141-48; and multiplicity, 34; and music, 

343; and organ, 256; and segmentarity, 

212-13; and social formation, 435-36; and 

voice, 303-4, 307-8. See also Assemblage; 

Multiplicity Machinic assemblage: and 

body, 88-90; and

 

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INDEX D 601

 

diagrammatic, 145; and enunciation, 7, 

36-37; and multiplicity, 34; and 

nomadology, 23; and plane of 

consistency, 71-73; and power, 17; and 

rhizome, 22; and stratification, 41-42, 

56-57, 68. See also Assemblage; 

Multiplicity

 

McLuhan, Marshall: 360

 

Mahler, Gustav: 339

 

Maldiney, Henri: 547 n. 32, 574 n. 31; and 

nomad art, 493, 495

 

Mallarme, Stephane: 127, 346

 

Malmberg, Bertil: 101, 518 n. 2

 

Man: as molar entity, 292-93; white, and 

faciality, 176-79. See also Human beings

 

Mandelbrot, Benoit: 486-87

 

Mann, Daniel: 233

 

Mann, Klaus: 230-31

 

Mann, Thomas: and music, 97

 

Mannerism: and territory, 320. See also 

Painting

 

Manual de zoologiafantastica: 241

 

Mao Tse-tung: 5, 20, 226

 

Map: and body without organs, 163-64; 

and line, 202-3; and regime of signs, 119; 

and representation, 12; and rhizome, 

12-15, 19-20; and segmentarity, 222; and 

tracing, 12-15. See also Cartography; 

Tracing

 

Marcel, Gabriel: 362

 

Mark, Gospel according to: 124. See also 

Bible, the

 

Marshall, Alexander James: 550 n. 34

 

Marshall Plan: and capitalist axiomatic, 

462

 

Martinet, Andre: 64, 528 n. 46, 530 n. 30

 

Martino, Ernesto de: 546 n. 97

 

Marx, Karl: 558 n. 61, 567 nn. 27-28, 

31-32, 568 n. 34, 568-69 n. 41, 570 n. 59; 

and book, 127; and capitalist axiomatic, 

454, 463; and capture, 443; and State 

apparatus, 427-28, 447-48; and 

subjectivity, 453; and surplus value, 

491-92. See also Capitalism; State 

apparatus

 

Marxism: and major language, 105; and 

State apparatus, xi

 

Masochism: and becoming-animal, 155-56, 

260; and body without organs, 150, 152, 

155-56

 

Mathematics: nomadic nature of, 24; and

 

smooth and striated space, xiii, 482-88.

 

See also Geometry; Number; Science 

Matheson, Richard: 279, 540 n. 23 Matter: 

and abstract machine, 511; and

 

body without organs, 43, 153; of book, 3;

 

and flow, 409-10; and form, 407-9; and

 

plane of consistency, 43, 45; and

 

stratification, 43. See also Form;

 

Substance Matthew, Gospel according to: 

124. See

 

also Bible, the Maupassant, 

Guy de: 193 Maurel, Christian: 

543 n. 58 May 1968: and 

philosophy, x; and

 

psychoanalysis, xi; and segmentarity, 216 

Mayani, Zacharia: 529 n. 14 Mazaheri, A.: 

561 n. 88 Mechanosphere: and 

stratification, 71, 74 Meinong, A.: on 

multiplicity, 32-33, 483 Mellaart, James: 

565 n. 11 Melville, Herman: 186-89, 199, 

205, 539 n.

 

15 Memory: and becoming, 291-98; 

and

 

deterritorialization, 293-94; and line and

 

point, 293-98; and music, 295-98; and

 

rhizome, 15-16; and tracing, 16. See also

 

Epistemology; Thought Menaechmus: 

and State science, 363 Meneur de loups: 

250 Mephisto: 230-31 Mercier, Jacques: 

533-34 n. 14 Messiaen, Olivier: 94, 300, 

301, 304, 309,

 

316-17,320,551 nn. 51,57-58 

Metallurgy: and flow, 410-11; and nomads,

 

404-15 passim. See also Flow; Science;

 

Technology Meunier, Jacques: 358 

Meyer, Francois: 550 n. 40 Michaux, 

Henri: 283, 285, 286 Michelet, Jules: 

221-22 Micropolitics: 208-31 passim. 
See also

 

Axiomatic; Molecule; Segmentarity;

 

State apparatus Milieu: definition of, 

xvii; of rhizome, 21;

 

and rhythm, 313-16; of stratification,

 

49-52, 54-55; and territory, 317-18,

 

321-23 Miller, Arthur: 291-92 Miller, 

Henry: 18-19, 147, 166, 186-87,

 

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602 □ INDEX

 

248, 260, 276, 286, 482, 530 nn. 25, 31, 

35, 533 n. 5, 546 n. 89, 551 n. 56

 

Millet, Jean Francois: 343

 

Millikan, Robert: 327

 

Milovanoff, Annie: 557 n. 49, 572 n. 6

 

Minority: and capitalist axiomatic, 469-73; 

and language, 105-6

 

Minor literature: 105

 

Minor science: 108-9, 361-74 passim, 

485-86

 

Moby-Dick: 243-45, 248-50, 304, 305

 

Mohammed: and nomads, 380, 383. See 

also Koran, the; Religion

 

Moiroux, Jacques: 537 n. 20

 

Molecule: and articulation, 34; and 

becoming, 248-50, 272-86 passim; and 

deterritorialization, 345-46; and music, 

308-9; and rhizome, 328-29; and 

stratification, 45, 52, 57-60. See also 

Becoming

 

Mondrian, Piet: 295, 301, 305, 546 n. 89

 

Monet, Claude: 298

 

Money: and capture, 442-43; and flow, 

226-27. See also Capitalism

 

Monge, Gaspard: 363, 554 n. 28, 556 n. 36

 

Monod, Jacques: 49, 521 ch. 3 n. 3, 522 n. 

21, 549 n. 30, 550 n. 41

 

Monsieur Zero: 279

 

Montesquieu: 564 n. 9

 

Montmollin, Robert: 570 n. 56

 

Morand, Paul: 279

 

More, Marcel: 304, 552 n. 60

 

Morgenstern, Laura: 574 n. 34

 

Moritz, Karl Philipp: 240, 512

 

Morphogenesis: and double articulation, 

42. See also Form

 

Moses: 122-24, 226; and book, 127; and 

nomads, 118, 383; as subject, 128, 130; 

and taxation, 394; and war machine, 

388, 390, 392-93, 417. See also Bible, 

the; Religion

 

Moulier, Yann: 469, 527 n. 40, 571 n. 66

 

Movement: and becoming, 280-81; and 

deterritorialization, 282, 326-27; and 

nomads, 381; and plane of consistency, 

281-82; and smooth and striated space, 

498-99; and State apparatus, 386. See 
also 
Slowness; Speed

 

Mozart, Wolfgang: 297, 304, 309, 350, 546 

n. 92; and refrain, 300, 347

 

Mr. Klein: 291-292

 

Mrs. Dalloway: 263

 

Multiplicity: and arborescent schema, 

16-17, 33; and assemblage, 8, 22-23, 34; 

and becoming-animal, 239-52 passim; 

and body without organs, 30, 154; and 

book, 4-7; and crowd, 30, 33-34; and 

evolution, 48-49; and faciality, 182-83; 

and individual, 254; and intensity, 33; 

and language, 66-67; and map, 15; 

molecular, 27-28; and music, 11-12; and 

nomad thought, xiii; and proper name, 

37-38; and psychoanalysis, 34-35; and 

rhizome, 6-9, 22, 30, 33, 505-6; and 

smooth space and striated space, 371, 

482-88; and stratification, 43, 52-53; and 

unconscious, 35; and unity, 8-9, 32-33. 
See also Assemblage; Consistency; 

Machine; Plane of consistency

 

Mumford, Lewis: 428, 457, 570 n. 58

 

Murard, Lion: 566 n. 16

 

Music: and becoming, 299-309; and 

consistency, 329-33, 343; and 

deterritorialization, 296-97, 301-3; and 

faciality, 186; and line of flight, 11-12; 

and metallurgy, 411; and molecule, 

308-9; and painting, 300-303; and plane 

of consistency, 267, 270-72; and refrain, 

347-50; and rhizome, 11-12; and smooth 

and striated space, xiii, 477-78; and 

subjectification, 137; and territory, 

318-19; and variation, 95-97, 104. See 
also 
Refrain

 

Musset, Lucien: 558 n. 62, 561 n. 83

 

Mussorgsky, Modest: 342, 550 n. 48; and 

refrain, 300

 

M'uzan, Michel de: 531 n. 5

 

Myrdal, Gunnar: 571 n. 62

 

Myth: and becoming, 237

 

Napoleon: 47, 558 n. 59

 

NASA: and capitalism, 455

 

Nash, Paul: 546 n. 89

 

Nature: and multiplicity, 5, 254; and plane

 

of consistency, 266; and resemblance,

 

234-35. See also Spinoza, Baruch;

 

Substance Nef, John Ulric: 564 n. 109 

Negri, Antonio: and capitalist axiomatic,

 

469

 

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INDEX □ 603

 

Nelli, Rene: 532 n. 13

 

Nicolai, J.: 550 n. 37

 

Nietzsche, Friedrich: 23, 125, 227, 257, 

296, 342-43, 345, 541 n. 44, 552 n. 5, 

555 n. 35; and book, 6; and 

deterritorialization, 510; and haeccity, 

268, 269; as minor philosopher, x; and 

nomad thought, xiii, 376-77; and power, 

xvii; and plane of consistency, 507; and 

refrain, 350

 

Nijinsky, Vaslav: 169,257

 

Noailles, Pierre: 565 n. 10

 

Nomadology: 315-423 passim; and history, 

23-34; and stratification, 43

 

Nomads: and art, 492-99; and 

deterritorialization, 53-54, 381-84; and 

evolutionism, 48-49; and flow, 404-15 
passim; and religion, 382-84; and 

semiotic, 118; and smooth space, 380-81, 

384-85, 410, 413-15, 474-500passim; 

and State apparatus, 384-85, 430-31; and 

war machine, 351-423passim. Seealso 

Deterritorialization; Smooth space; War 

machine

 

Nomad science: and royal science, 367-69, 

373-74; and war machine, 361-74 
passim. See also Pragmatics; Science

 

Nomos: and logos, 369-73; and nomad, xiii, 

370-71, 380-81; and number, 388; and 
polis, 353

 

Noology: and war machine, 374-80. See 

also Thought

 

Novel: and faciality, 173-74; as literary 

genre, 192-93

 

Novella: as literary genre, 192-207 passim

 

Number: and measurement, 8; and 

multiplicity, 484-85; semiotic of, 118; and 

war machine, 387-94. See also 

Geometry; Mathematics

 

Numbers, Book of: 388. See also Bible, the

 

Object: and book, 3; in Western 

metaphysics, xi. See also Epistemology; 

Subjectivity

 

Omnes, Roland: 521 ch. 3 n. 1

 

"On Slogans": 83

 

"On the Gradual Formation of Ideas in 

Speech" ("Uber die allmahliche 

Verfertigung der Gedanken beim 

Reden"): 378

 

Optical space: and nomad art, 493-99

 

Order-word: and content and expression, 

108-9; and death, 107-8, 110; and 

incorporeal transformation, 80-81, 

108-9; and indirect discourse, 84; and 

major and minor language, 106; and 

sign, 87; and speech acts, 79; and 

statement, 107; and variation, 94-95. See 
also 
Linguistics

 

Oresme, Nicholas: 540 n. 29

 

Organ: and becoming-animal, 258-59; and 

machine, 256. See also Body; Body 

without organs

 

Organism: and assemblage, 4; and body, 

41; and body without organs, 4, 30, 

158-63; and double articulation, 41-42; 

and faciality, 171-72; and nomad art, 

498-99; and State apparatus, 366-67; and 

stratification, 43-44, 50-54. See also 

Body; Body without organs

 

Organization: see Stratification

 

Orgasm: as orientation of Western thought, 

xiv, 22. See also Sexuality

 

Orient, the: as rhizome, 18-19; and State 

apparatus, 384-85; 450-51

 

Orlando: 294.

 

Ortigues, Edmond: 564 n. 2

 

Oury, Jean: x

 

Overcoding: and language, 62; and novella, 

200-201; and rhizome, 8-9; and 

stratification, 63. See also Coding; 

Language; Linguistics

 

Pacotte, Julien: 519 n. 13, 544 n. 82 

Painting: and deterritorialization, 301; and

 

faciality, 172-73, 178-79, 184-85; and

 

line and point, 298; and memory, 295;

 

and music, 300-303; and refrain, 347-48.

 

See also Faciality Parain, Brice: 523 n. 4 

Parain, Charles: 569 n. 43 Parant, 

Jean-Luc: 534 n. 16 Pareto, Vilfredo: 439 

Paris, Jean: 184-85 Parnet, Claire: 517 nn. 

1,4 Pasolini, Pier Paolo: 106,523 n. 5,527n. 

39 "Passionement" (Passionately): 98 

Peirce, C. S.: 531 n. 41 Pelleas et 
Melisande: 
299 Pelliot, Paul: 561 n. 81

 

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604 □ INDEX

 

Penthesilea: 355

 

Perrier, Edmond: 46, 255, 522 n. 8

 

Perronet, Jean: and State science, 363, 365

 

Petitot, Jean: 16-18, 544 n. 82

 

Phallogocentrism: as model of identity, xii

 

Phantasy: and body without organs, 151; 

and psychoanalysis, 154-55

 

Philebus: 306

 

Philosophy: modern, 128, 342-43; and 

nomad thought, x, xiii; and State 

apparatus, ix-x, 375-76. See also Thought

 

Phylum: machinic, 409-10; and weapon, 

406-7

 

Physics: and smooth and striated space, 

488-92. See also Science

 

Pingaud, Bernard: 544 n. 79

 

Pinhas, Richard: 551 n. 53, 562 n. 94

 

Pink Panther. 11,25

 

Pirenne, Henri: 222

 

Pirou, Gaetan: 566 n. 24

 

Plane: definition of, xvii; and haeccity, 

265-72 passim; of organization, 265-66. 
See also Geometry; Line; Point; Space

 

Plane of consistency: and abstract machine, 

70-73, 513-14; and becoming, 251-52; 

and becoming-animal, 258-59; and body 

without organs, 154-55, 158, 159, 

165-66, 270, 506-8; and book, 4; of brain, 

15; and deterritorialization, 70-71, 270, 

272; and diagrammatic, 144-45; and 

haeccity, 266-72; and intensity, 70; and 

language, 65, 91, 109; and line of flight, 

270; and map, 12; and machinic 

assemblage, 71-73; and multiplicity, 9; 

and music, 270-71; and regime of signs, 

141-42; and rhizome, 21; and 

stratification, 40, 49-50, 56-57, 69-73, 

269-70; and subjectification, 134; and 

war machine, 422-23; and writing, 

268-69. See also Assemblage; 

Consistency; Heterogeneity; Line; 

Rhizome

 

Planomenon: and stratification, 50, 56, 73. 

See also Ecumenon

 

Plateau: and body without organs, 158; and 

book, ix; and chapter, 22; and rhizome, 

21-22; and smooth space, xiv-xv. See also 

Intensity; Nomads; Rhizome

 

Plato: xi, xii, 559 n. 66; and royal science, 

361,369,475

 

Point: and arborescent schema, 293-94; and 

line of flight, 298; and nomads, 380; and 

rhizome, 8; of subjectification, 129. See 
also 
Geometry; Line; Plane; Space

 

Politics: and axiomatics, 461; and language, 

82-83, 100-110; and line, 204; and war, 

419-21, 467. See also Axiomatic; 

Capitalism; State apparatus

 

Pollock, Jackson: 546 n. 89, 575 n. 38

 

Polyvocality: and faciality, 179-81

 

Pompidou, Georges: and May 1968, 216; 

and State apparatus, 424-25

 

Poncelet, Jean: 363, 554 n. 23

 

Pontalis, J.-B.: 541 n. 41, 544 n. 79

 

Popelin, Claude: 522 n. 18

 

Population: and deterritorialization, 

345-46; and stratification, 52-53. See also 

Crowd; Multiplicity

 

Portes du paradis, Les: 23-24

 

Poststructuralism: and State philosophy, 

xi-xii

 

Potemkin: 184

 

Pottier, Rene: 560 n. 72

 

Pound, Ezra: 105, 176, 200, 520 n. 18

 

Power (pouvoir): arborescent structure, of, 

17; definition of, xvii; and faciality, 175; 

and language, 7, 75-76, 95, 101, 105-6; 

and minor philosophy, x; and 

psychoanalysis, x-xi; and segmentarity, 

224-27; and State apparatus, 227, 

431-32. See also State apparatus

 

Power (puissance): and capitalist axiomatic, 

466-67; definition of, xvii; and faciality, 

175; and language, 95, 106; and war 

machine, 392. See also Consistency; War 

machine

 

Pragmatics: and becoming, 251; generative 

and transformational, 139-40; and 

incorporeal transformation, 82-83; and 

language, 77-78, 92; and linguistics, 85, 

90-91, 97-98; and map, 15, 146-47; and 

nomad thought, xiii; as schizoanalysis, 

146; and State philosophy, xv; and 

stratification, 43. See also Nomad 

science; Schizoanalysis

 

Preaux, Claire: 563 n. 106

 

Primitive society: and segmentarity, 

209-13; and State apparatus, 357-61, 

429-31, 433. See also Evolution

 

Princesse de Cleves, La: 173-74

 

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INDEX D 605

 

Prison: and language, 66-67

 

Proclus: 554

 

Profit: as apparatus of capture, 441-42. See 

also Capitalism

 

Proper name: and abstract machine, 142; 

and body without organs, 35; and 

haeccity, 263-64; and intensity, 27-28; 

and multiplicity, 27-28, 37-38; and 

order-word, 84; and variation, 100; of 

Wolf-Man, 26-27. See also Subjectivity

 

Property: and deterritonalization, 388; and 

State apparatus, 428, 449. See also 

Capitalism

 

Propp, Vladimir: 194

 

Proust, Marcel: 196, 266, 358, 526 n. 27, 

541 n. 39, 542 n. 47, 545 n. 84, 548 nn. 

15, 19, 550 n. 46; and becoming-woman, 

277; and deterritonalization, 306; and 

faciality, 185-86; and haeccity, 271-72; 

and marginalism, 438-39; and music, 

319; and proper name, 37; and refrain, 

347; and secret, 290; and variation, 98

 

Proust and Signs: 518 n. 25, 526 n. 27

 

Psychanalyse et transversalit'e: 517 n. 10

 

Psychiatry: and delusion, 119-21, 128

 

Psychoanalysis: and arborescent schema, 

17-18; and becoming-animal, 259-60; and 

body without organs, 151, 165; and 

causality, 283-84; and haeccity, 264; and 

multiplicity, 34-35, 38; and phantasy, 

154-55; and politics, x-xi; as priesthood, 

154-55; and schizoanalysis, 17-18; and 

secret, 288-89; semioticof, 125; and 

subjectification, 130-31; as tracing, 

12-15. See also Freud, Sigmund; 

Schizoanalysis; Unconscious

 

Public sphere: and private property, 451-52

 

Quebecois: as minor language, 101-2, 104 

Querrien, Anne: 364-66,556 n. 36,573 n. 24 

Quinet, Edgar: 452

 

Race: and faciality, 178; and nomad

 

thought, 379-80. See also Man 

Ravel, Maurice: 270-71 Ray, Jean: 

29, 569 n. 50 Reality: and 

representation, 23; and

 

subjectification, 129-30. See also

 

Epistemology Reason: as law, 

xii-xiii; and State

 

apparatus, 375-76

 

Recherches: 517 n. 11

 

Refrain: 310-50 passim; and assemblage, 

312, 323-27; and becoming, 350; and 

deterritonalization, 300-302; and music, 

299-302; and plateau, xiv-xv; and 

territory, 317, 321. See also Music

 

Regime of signs: and abstract machine, 

141-42; and assemblage, 119, 121-22, 

140-41; authoritarian and despotic, 

121-22; and deterritonalization, 141-43, 

508; and enunciation, 7; and incorporeal 

transformation, 88; and map, 119; and 

order-word, 83-84; and plane of 

consistency, 141-42; and rhizome, 21; 

and semiotic, 11, 136; and stratification, 

63, 68; and subjectification, 130. See 
also 
Language; Linguistics; Semiotic; 

Sign

 

Regis, Emmanuel: 529 n. 11

 

Regnault, Francois: 526 n. 32

 

Reich, Steve: 542 n. 46

 

Reich, Wilhelm: 534 n. 22

 

Reinberg, A.: 549 n. 29

 

Religion: and State apparatus, 382-84; and 

territory, 321-22

 

Rent: as apparatus of capture, 440-41

 

Representation: and arborescent schema, 

12; and assemblage, 23; and body, 86; 

and book, 5-7; and heterogeneity, 10

 

Reterritorialization: see 

Deterritonalization

 

Reuleaux, Franz: 457

 

Revel, Jacques: 527 n. 36

 

Revolution moleculaire, La: 517-18 n. 12

 

Rhizome: as antigenealogy, 10-11, 21; and 

arboresent schema, xii, 6-7, 20, 34, 

328-29, 506; and becoming, 25, 238-39, 

294; and book, 6-7, 11, 22-23; and 

evolution, 10-11; and faciality, 190-91; 

and language, 109-10; and line, 203, 

505-6; and linguistics, 7-8, 91, 92; and 

map, 20; and multiplicity, 6-9, 30, 505-6; 

and nomads, 415; and novella, 199; and 

segmentarity, 211; and smooth and 

striated space, 371, 506; and 

stratification, 53, 74; and 

subjectification, 134; as unconscious, 18; 

and variation, 95-96; and writing, 24-25. 
See also Arborescent schema; Flow;

 

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606 □ INDEX

 

Nomads; Plane of consistency Rhythm." 

and consistency, 328-29; and

 

milieu, 313-16; and refrain, 313-14; and

 

territory, 318-20. See also Music 

Ricardo, David: 567 nn. 27-28, 30-31 

"Rideau cramoisi, Le": (The crimson

 

curtain): 193 Riegl, Alois: 574 n. 32; 

and nomad art,

 

492-93, 495 Riemann, Georg: 142, 

573 n. 16; and

 

multiplicity, 32, 482-83 Riemannian 

space: 476, 485-86. See also

 

Geometry; Space Rimbaud, Arthur: 

379 Riviere, Jacques: Artaud's 

correspondence

 

with, 377-78 Robert, Jean: 565 n. 11, 

568 n. 40 Romanticism: and territory, 

338-42 Ronai, Maurice: 533 n. 13 

Rorschach test: and faciality, 180 Rose, 

Steven: 519 n. 12 Rosenstiehl, Pierre: 

16-18, 544 n. 82 Rossini, Gioacchino: 

307 Roth, Karl Heinz: 571 n. 66 Rouget, 

Gilbert: 526 n. 29 Rousseau, 

Jean-Jacques: 81-96 Roussel, Raymond: 

288-89 Rovini, Robert: on Holderlin, 268 

Royal science: and nomad science, 367-68,

 

373-74. See also Science; State

 

apparatus "Ruse, Une" (An 

artifice): 193 Rush, J. H.: 522 n. 12 

Russell, Bertrand: and logic, 148; and

 

multiplicity, 33, 483 Ruwet, Nicolas: 

99 Ruyer, Raymond: 332, 521 ch. 3 n. 3, 

550

 

n. 36 Ryan, Michael: 571 

n. 66

 

Sadock, J. M.: 525 n. 22 Sahlins, 

Marshall: 573 n. 25 Saint-Geours, 

Jean: 569-70 n. 52 Salle, J. B. de la: 

533 n. 7 Samson, Joseph: 547 n. 3 

Samuel, Claude: 548 n. 13 Sarraute, 

Nathalie: 196-97,267 Sartre, 

Jean-Paul: and faciality, 171 Saumjan, 

S. K.: 525-26 n. 22 Saussure, 

Ferdinand de: 524 n. 7

 

Scherer, Rene: 273

 

Schizoanalysis: and abstract machine, 513; 

and becoming, 251; and body without 

organs, 165; and faciality, 188; and line, 

202-3; and map, 13; and nomad thought, 

xiii; and pragmatics, 146; and 

psychoanalysis, 17-18; and stratification, 

43. See also Pragmatics; Psychoanalysis

 

Schleiermacher, August: xii

 

Schmitt, Bernard: 445-46, 536 n. 14, 567 n. 

32

 

Schnebel, Dieter: 96

 

Schoenberg, Arnold: and refrain, 350

 

Schopenhauer as Educator: 376

 

Schreber, Daniel Paul: 5, 120, 288-89, 531 

n. 3

 

Schumann, Robert: 270, 297-98, 304, 

307-8, 550 n. 47; and refrain, 300, 303, 

347, 350

 

Schwob, Marcel: 23-24

 

Science: and assemblage, 22-23; and 

axiomatic, 461; and deterritorialization, 

372; and diagrammatic, 143-44; major 

and minor, 108-9, 361-74; and nomads, 

24. See also Mathematics; Nomad 

science; Technology

 

Searle, John: 524 n. 9

 

Secret: and content and form, 286-89; and 

line, 205; and novella, 193-94, 196-97; 

and paranoia, 288-89; and perception, 

286-87; and sexuality, 289-90; and war 

machine, 287-88

 

Sedentary: and nomad, 414-15

 

Segmentarity: and coding, 222-24; and 

deterritorialization, 222-24; and line, 

206-7, 209, 211 -12, 217, 222-26; and line 

of flight, 216, 223-24; molar and 

molecular, 213, 215-17, 224-25, 228; and 

novella, 195-202; and rhizome, 211; 

rigid, 212; and State apparatus, 218, 

222-27; supple, 213. See also 

Consistency; State apparatus; 

Stratification; Striated space

 

Self (Moi): definition of, xvii-xviii; and 

order-word, 84; and subjedification, 

132, 133; and war machine, 356. See also 

Subjectivity

 

Semantics: and speech acts, 77-78. See also 

Linguistics

 

Semiology: and regime of signs, 111-12.

 

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INDEX □ 607

 

See also Language; Linguistics; Sign; 

Signifiance

 

Semiotic: and deterritorialization, 135; and 

faciality, 180-82; and regime of signs, 

136; and State apparatus, 135; 

transformation of, 136-39. See also 

Language; Linguistics; Regime of signs; 

Sign; Signifiance

 

Sephiha, Vidal: 527 n. 35

 

Serieux, Paul: 119-20

 

Serres, Michel: 361, 371-72, 489-90, 519 n. 

13, 554 n. 24, 555 n. 32

 

Sexuality: and becoming, 246, 275-79; and 

rhizome, 18. See also Desire; Love

 

Shakespeare, William: 125-26, 354

 

Shestov, Leon: 206, 376

 

Shrinking Man: 279

 

Sign: and assemblage, 504; and book, 4; 

and content and expression, 117; and 

deterritorialization, 67-68, 87, 112-13, 

115-17, 121; and faciality, 123; and 

order-word, 87; and signifiance, 112; 

signifying regime of, 112; and State 

apparatus, 118; and stratification, 64-69; 

and thing and word, 66-67; and tool, 

400-402. See also Language; Linguistics; 

Regime of signs; Semiotic; Signifiance

 

Signature: and territory, 316

 

Signifiance: and abstract machine, 91; and 

arborescent schema, 16; and body 

without organs, 159-61; definition of, 

xviii; and faciality, 179-82; and 

information, 79; and interpretation, 114; 

and regime of signs, 68; and 

subjectifi-cation, 167-68; and writing, 22. 
See also Language; Linguistics; Semiotic; 

Sign

 

Signified: see Sign

 

Signifier: see Sign

 

Simmel, Georg: 544 n. 76

 

Simondon, Gilbert: 408-10, 522 nn. 11, 19, 

523 n. 31, 555 n. 33

 

Simpson, George Gaylord: 522 n. 10

 

Sin: and segmentarity, 218

 

Sinacoeur, Hourya: 551 n. 54

 

Sirens: 308

 

Slepian, Vladimir: and becoming-animal, 

258-60, 274

 

Slowness: and form, 254; and science, 

371-72; and stratification, 56. See also 

Movement; Speed

 

Smith, Patti: 19

 

Smooth space: and aesthetics, 492-99; and 

body without organs, 479; and 

capitalism, 490-92; and minor science, 

361-62; and multiplicity, 482-88; and 

nomads, 380-81,384-85, 410,413-15; 

and number, 389; and thought, xiii, 

379-80; and plateau, xiv-xv; and 

rhizome, 506; and State apparatus, 

489-92; and striated space, 353, 369-73, 

387, 474-500 passim; and war machine, 

363-64, 422-23, 489-92. See also 

Consistency; Nomads; Plane of 

consistency; Rhizome; Space; Striated 

space

 

Society: and segmentarity, 208-31 passim. 

See also Politics; State apparatus

 

Solomon: 122, 123, 534 n. 14. See also 

Bible, the; Jewish people

 

Solon: 557 n. 51

 

Songs and Dances of Death: 300

 

"Son of Sam": 80

 

Sorcery: and becoming-animal, 239-52 

passim

 

Space: and haeccity, 261-63; holey, 413-15; 

and refrain, 311-12; and State apparatus, 

388-89. See also Geometry; Smooth 

space; Striated space

 

Spaier, Albert: 573 n. 15

 

Speech: and action, 77-78; and language, 

78, 92. See also Language; Linguistics

 

Speed: and becoming-animal, 258-59; and 

body, 260-61; and book, 3-4; and form, 

254; and haeccity, 261-62; and nomads, 

381, 499; and plane of consistency, 

270-71; and science, 371-72; and State 

apparatus, 386; and stratification, 56. 
See also Movement; Slowness

 

Speed: 152

 

Spengler, Oswald: 76

 

Spinoza, Baruch: x, xiii, xvi, 123, 153-54, 

158, 253-54, 256-57, 260-61, 507

 

Spinozism: 253-60

 

Spirit: Hegelian, and Cosmos, 342

 

Spitz, Rene: 169-70

 

Ssu-ma Ch'ien: 559 n. 69

 

Stalin, Joseph: 525 n. 21

 

Stalinism: and segmentarity, 214-15. See 

also State apparatus; Totalitarianism

 

Starobinski, Jean: 552 n. 10

 

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608 D INDEX

 

State apparatus: and abstract machine, 

223; and assemblage, 513; and 

axiomatic, 460-73 passim; and 

becoming-animal, 242-43, 247-48; and 

book, 24; and capitalism, 434-35, 

452-59; and capture, 444-45; and coding, 

434, 448-51, 459-60; and consistency, 

431-32, 434-35; and deterritorialization, 

432-34; and flow, 448-49, 452-53, 

459-60; form of, 448-60 passim; and 

history, 23; and line, 204; and nomads, 

384-85; and number, 388-94; and 

philosophy, ix-xii, 375-76; poles of, 

424-26; and power, 227; and primitive 

society, 357-61; and religion, 382-84; and 

segmentarity, 208-31 passim; and sign, 

116-18, 135; and smooth and striated 

space, 385-87,489-92; and social 

formation, 435-37; and stratification, 

68-69, 433; and subjectivity, 375-76, 

460; and thought, 24; and violence, 

447-48; and war machine, 24, 229-31, 

351-423 passim, 416-27, 430-31; and 

writing, 401-2. See also Axiomatic; 

Capitalism; Nomads; Stratification; 

Striated space; War machine

 

Statement: and action, 77, 79, 86; 

definition of, xviii; and order-word, 107; 

and speech act, 79; subject of, 129. See 
also 
Enunciation; Linguistics

 

Sternberg, Josef von: 532 n. 1

 

Stockhausen, Karlheinz: 266,342,551 n. 53

 

Stoics: and incorporeal transformation, 86

 

"Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass, The": 

200-202

 

Stratification: 40-74 passim; and 

assemblage, 503-5; and body without 

organs, 159-63; and book, 3-4; and 

consistency, 335-37; and content and 

expression, 502-3; and diagrammatic, 

142-45, 148; and plane of consistency, 

269-70; and State apparatus, 433; and 

subjectification, 134. See also 

Segmentarity; State apparatus; Striated 

space

 

Stravinsky, Igor: 545 n. 87

 

Striated space: and aesthetics, 492-99; and 

capitalism, 490-92; and minor science, 

361-62; and multiplicity, 482-88; and 

rhizome, 506; and smooth space, 353,

 

369-73, 413-15, 474-500 passim; and 

State apparatus, xiii, 385-87, 489-92; and 

thought, 379-80; and war machine, 

489-92. See also Nomads; Smooth space; 

Space; State apparatus; Stratification

 

Strike: 413-14

 

Strindberg, August: 115, 132, 278

 

Structuralism: and binary logic, 5; and 

resemblance, 235-36; and rhizome, 12. 
See also Linguistics

 

Structure: and linguistics, 92-101

 

Subjectification: and abstract machine, 

134; and arborescent schema, 16; and 

body without organs, 134, 159-61; and 

deterritorialization, 133, 134; and 

faciality, 179-82; and interpretation, 138; 

and line of flight, 134; and plane of 

consistency, 134; and postsignifying 

regime, 119; and regime of signs, 130, 

132-33; and signifiance, 167-68; and 

stratification, 134; and writing, 22. See 
also 
Signifiance

 

Subjectivity: and assemblage, 264-65; and 

book, 3-4; and capitalism, 456-59; and 

haeccity, 261-65; and language, 78; and 

multiplicity, 8-9; and property, 451-53; 

and representation, 23; and State 

apparatus, 375-76, 460; and State 

philosophy, xii-xiii; and thought, 379-80; 

in Western metaphysics, xi

 

Substance: and abstract machine, 511; and 

articulation, 41; and body without 

organs, 153-54; and form, 43; and 

stratification, 43, 52. See also Form; 

Matter; Spinoza, Baruch

 

Sue, Eugene: 358

 

Swann's Love (L'Amour de Swann): 185-86

 

Symbol: and sign, 112, and stratification, 

65. See also Icon; Index; Linguistics

 

Synge, J. M.: 526 n. 32

 

Synthesizer: and language, 109; and 

machine, 343; and musical variation, 

95-96. See also Music

 

Sznycer, Evelyne: 548 n. 16

 

Szondi test: and faciality, 180

 

Tale: as literary genre, 192-95

 

Tales of Power: 162

 

Tamerlane: and war machine, 419

 

Tao: and pleasure, 157. See also Religion

 

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INDEX □ 609

 

Tarahumaras, Les: 158

 

Tarde, Gabriel: 216, 218-19, 548 n. 10, 575 

n. 34

 

Taxation: as apparatus of capture, 442-43; 

and number, 394. See also Money; State 

apparatus

 

Technology: and stratification, 60-61; and 

weapon, 404-7. See also Science

 

Tel Quel: xi

 

Territory: and art, 316-17, 320-21; and 

assemblage, 323-27, 332-34, 503-5; and 

coding, 322; and expression, 317-18; and 

milieu, 317-18, 321-23; and multiplicity, 

33; and novella, 195; and organization, 

388-89; and refrain, 312, 317, 321; and 

rhythm, 314-16, 320; and segmentarity, 

212-13; and stratification, 40, 53-57; and 

substance, 41; and war machine, 419. See 
also 
Deterritorialization

 

Tetry, Andre: 547 n. 101

 

Theology: and becoming-animal, 252-53. 

See also Religion

 

Thesiger, Wilfred: 557 n. 55-56, 572 n. 7

 

Third World: and capitalist axiomatic, 465, 

468-69

 

Thorn, Rene: 481, 539 n. 16

 

Thorpe, W. H.: 333, 548 n. 8, 550 n. 33

 

Thought: and arborescent schema, 15-17; 

and smooth and striated space, 379-80; 

and State apparatus, 374-80; and 

subjectivity, 379-80; and war machine, 

376-78

 

Timaeus: 361, 369

 

Time: and haeccity, 261-63; and literary 

genre, 193-94

 

Time and Free Will: 483

 

Tinbergen, Nikolaas: 327

 

Titian: and faciality, 173

 

Titorelli, Painter: 529 n. 15

 

To Be Done with the Judgment of God: 163

 

Todaro,G.J.: 10

 

Tokei, Ferenc: 449, 565 n. 9

 

Tool: and machinic assemblage, 90; and 

sign, 400-402; and State apparatus, 

400-403; and stratification, 60-61; and 

weapon, 395-403. See also Technology

 

Totalitarianism: and capitalist axiomatic, 

462; and segmentarity, 214-15; and State 

apparatus, 230-31. See also Fascism; 

State apparatus

 

Tournier, Michel: 261

 

Town: and State apparatus, 432-34. See

 

also City Toynbee, Arnold J.: and 

nomads, 381, 482 Tracing: and arborescent 

schema, 20; book

 

as, 24; and map, 12-15; and rhizome,

 

12-15. See also Map Transfiguration, 

The: 178 Transformation: analogical, 

136-37; and

 

becoming, 250-53; incorporeal, 80-83,

 

85-88; and pragmatics, 139-40. See also

 

Incorporeal transformation 

Translation: and multiplicity, 486; of

 

semiotic, 136-39; 486; and stratification,

 

62-63. See also Language Tree: 

see Arborescent schema Trial, 
The: 
xvii

 

Tronti, Mario: 571 n. 66, 571-72 n. 67 

Troyes, Chretien de: 174, 533 n. 8 

Troyes, Garin de: 364 Trudaine: 365

 

Truffaut, Francois: 546 n. 96 TV: and 

machinic enslavement, 458. See

 

also Technology 

Typee: 188-89

 

Uexkull, Jacob von: 51, 257, 315 

Unconscious: and arborescent schema, 18; 

and body without organs, 30; and 

causality, 284; and multiplicity, 29-32, 35; 

and pack, 35; and resemblance, 235; as 

rhizome, 12-15, 18. See also Freud, 

Sigmund; Psychoanalysis "Unconscious, 

The": 27-28 United Nations: and State 

apparatus, 435 Universal History of Infamy, 
A: 
241

 

Vallier, Dora: 575 n. 38

 

Varese, Edgar: 309, 343, 344, 551 n. 56

 

Variation: and abstract machine, 511-12; 

and deterritorialization, 99; in language, 

93-95, 97-100; and matter, 408-9; and 

minor language, 101-10; and royal 

science, 369-70. See also Constant; 

Linguistics

 

Varron: 565 n. 10

 

Vauban, Marquis de: 363

 

Vendryes, Pierre: 521 n. 3

 

Verdi, Giuseppe: 307-8, 341-42

 

Vergez, Raoul: 554 n. 3

 

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610 a INDEX

 

Vergopoulos, Kostas: 570 n. 53

 

Vermeer, Jan: 347

 

Vernant, Jean-Pierre: 236, 536 n. 7, 543 n. 

61, 559 n. 66, 564 nn. 7-8, 573 n. 21, 574 

n. 29

 

Veyne, Paul: 569 n. 44

 

Vialleton, Louis: 46-47

 

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre: 565 n. 9

 

Virilio, Paul: 231, 395-96, 520-21 n. 24, 

536 nn. 8, 12, 554 n. 22, 564 n. 10; and 

capitalist axiomatic, 462; and 

deterritorialization, 345; and smooth 

space, 480; and State apparatus, 212, 

386-87; and war machine, 467

 

Visage (Face): 96, 302

 

Vivier,Odile:551n. 52

 

Vladimirtsov, Boris: 394, 560 n. 71

 

Vuillard, Jean Edouard: 175

 

Vuillemin, Jules: 573 n. 14

 

Wagenbuch, Klauss: 527 n. 39

 

Wagner, Richard: 127, 142, 269, 270, 

307-8,319,341-42

 

Wahl, Jean: 526 n. 32

 

War: and capitalism, 421, 466, 467; and 

hunt, 395-96; and politics, 467; and war 

machine, 416-23. See also State 

apparatus

 

War machine: and assemblage, 406-7, 513; 

and becoming, 277-78; and 

becoming-animal, 242-43, 247-48, 396; 

and body, 366-67; and capitalist 

axiomatic, 466-67, 471-73; and 

diagrammatic, 144; and line of flight, 

422-23; and nomads, 351-423 passim; 

and plane of consistency, 422-23; and 

religion, 383-84; and secret, 287-88; and 

segmentarity, 218, 222-27; semiotic of, 

118; and smooth and striated space, 

363-64, 422-23, 489-92; and State 

apparatus, 24, 229-30, 351-427 passim, 

430-31; and thought, 376-78. See also 

Nomads; Smooth space; State apparatus

 

Watt, W. Montgomery: 557 n. 50

 

Waves, The: 252, 513

 

Weapon: and nomads, 403-15 passim; and

 

tool, 395-403. See also Technology; War 

Weber, Max: 556 n. 42 Webern, Anton 

von: 142, 511 Weinreich, U.: 7 Wenders, 

Wim: 482 What Maisie Knew: 290 White, 

Kenneth: 379 White, Lynn Townsend, Jr.: 

560 n. 79, 561

 

n. 86 White wall: and faciality, 

167-91; and

 

signifiance, 167-68. See also Black hole 

Wilf, Herberts.: 519 n. 14 Will, Edouard: 

442, 568 n. 35 Will to Power, The: 269 
Willard: 233, 243 William the Conqueror: 

19 Wilson, Robert: 98 Wittfogel, Karl: 19, 

363, 565 n. 9 Wolf-Man, the: 26-38 passim, 

239, 249,

 

250. See also Freud, Sigmund Wolfson, 

Louis: 273 Woolf, Virginia: 29, 239, 252, 

263, 276-77,

 

280, 294, 329 Worringer, Wilhelm: 411, 

575; and nomad

 

art, 415, 492-93, 495-99 Wozzeck: 339 

Writing: and abstract machine, 65; and

 

becoming-animal, 240; and

 

deterritorialization, 11; and dualism, 20;

 

and measurement, 4-5; and memory, 16;

 

and nomad art, 497; and plane of

 

consistency, 268-69; and rhizome, 23*25;

 

and State apparatus, 401-2; and

 

subjectification, 22. See also Book;

 

Language Wunderlich, Dieter: 519 n. 11, 

525 n. 22,

 

526 n. 24

 

Yoga: and body without organs, 151 

Young, La Monte: 344

 

Zavin, Fanny: 543 n. 64 

Zola, Emile: 523 n. 2

 

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Illustrations

 

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor. By permission of

 

G. Ricordi, Milan. Copyright 1970 by G. Ricordi E. C. SPA. 

3

 

Photo Boyer, Wolf Tracks on Snow. Viollet Collection. 

26

 

Photo Boyer, Lobster. Collection Viollet. 

39

 

Fritz Lang, The Testament of Doctor Mabuse (bullet-ridden dummie of

 

Dr. Mabuse). 

75

 

The Ark of the Covenant with the Column of Fire and the Cloud. Musee

 

des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, Viollet Collection. 

111

 

M. Griaule and G. Dieterlan, The Pale Fox. Institut d'ethnologie,

 

Musee de l'Homme, Paris (the first Yala of Amma's egg). 

149

 

Duccio, The Calling of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew. Bulloz Collection,

 

New York. 

167

 

Faces from Jacques Mercier, Rouleaux magiques ethiopiens. Seuel. 183 
R. F. Outeceault, Buster Brown, le petit facteur. Librairie Hachette. 192 
Fermand Leger, Men in the Cities, 1919. Copyright 1987 by ARS,

 

N.Y./SPADEM. 

208

 

Wolf-Man, Cerveteri Etruscan Amphora. Musee du Louvre, Paris. Photo

 

by Chuzeville. 

232

 

Etruscan Plate. Etruscan National Museum, Rome. 

232

 

Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922. Water color, pen and ink, I6V4 x

 

12". Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 

Copyright 19 8 7 by Cosmopress, Geneva. 

310

 

Drawing of a Wooden Chariot. Hermitage Museum, Leningrad. 

351

 

Chomel, Dictionnaire economique, 1732. Entry for "Perdrix" Partridge. 424 
Crazy in Stripes, Vermont 1865. From Jonathan Holstein, American

 

Pieced Quilts (New York: Viking, 1973). 

474

 

Computer Einstein. 

501

 

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Gilles Deleuze was a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris 

at Vincennes. English translations of Deleuze's work include Kant's 
Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, Cinema I: Image/ 
Movement 
(both published by Minnesota) and Nietzsche and Philoso-
phy. 
Felix Guattari, a practicing psychoanalyst and lifelong political 

activist, worked since the mid-1950s at La Borde, an experimental 

psychiatric clinic. He was an active participant in the European 

Network for alternatives to Psychiatry. Together, Deleuze and Guattari 

coauthored Anti-Oedipus and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, also 

available in translation from Minnesota.

 

Brian Massumi received his Ph.D. in French at Yale University, and is 

currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. Massumi 

translated Jacques Attali's Noise,  Michel de Certeau's Heterologies, 

and (with Geoff Bennington) Jean-Francois Lyotard's Postmodern 
Condition
—all published by Minnesota.